


Jim Kirk Is An Insufferable Idiot and Other Lessons Learned Along the Way

by silverlining99



Series: JTK [2]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Academy Era, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-29
Updated: 2009-06-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 19:28:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverlining99/pseuds/silverlining99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>McCoy kind of stinks at it, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jim Kirk Is An Insufferable Idiot and Other Lessons Learned Along the Way

**Author's Note:**

> Same events, McCoy's POV.

Like a number of other things he’s caught himself doing since enlisting, McCoy takes Tactical Analysis because Jim Kirk asked him to. His argument against it - “I’m a doctor, Jim, not a fucking bridge officer, what the hell do I want to take that for?” - fell on deaf ears.

Jim, he had learned in short order, was scheduled for the Kobayashi Maru. And like a number of other moronic ideas that kid had had since enlisting, he wanted McCoy to do it with him, which meant McCoy had to be enrolled in or have already taken Tactical.

Someday, McCoy swears to himself as he takes his seat and wonders if he can get away with working on lab notes during the lectures, he’s going to figure out how to tell Jim no and have it _mean_ something. Lost in that thought, he’s not paying much attention to his surroundings until a light female voice next to him murmurs out an appealing fantasy of mass casualties striking their overwhelmingly command-track classmates.

He tosses out a dry retort before he even thinks about, then actually looks at her. She’s nothing remarkable - cute enough face, bright brown eyes with a sly gleam in them, shiny blond hair pulled back into a tidy twist at the back of her head - but something about her is more familiar than he can account for by simply passing her off as another cadet he's seen around campus. "Help me out, here," he asks, trying to place her. "I know you from somewhere."

She doesn’t miss a beat in taking him to task, serenely. “I live six doors down from you. And yesterday? That was _my_ hand you shoved into a chest cavity to staunch a bleed in that Bolian you were operating on.”

He remembers that hand, the way it hadn’t so much as trembled as he passed a laser two millimeters away from it to seal the bleed. He remembers the calm brown eyes that met his over her surgical mask when he finally looked up, his own forehead prickling with a panicky sweat.

McCoy does a great many things well. Taking his lumps, gracefully, is generally not one of them.

“Well...shit,” he mutters. Her smile and wink are a relief. “Okay, let’s pretend I’m _not_ the only one here needing an introduction. Leonard McCoy.”

“Christine Chapel.”

He thinks back to his surgery, to who would have been in that room and this one. “Med student?”

“Nurse,” she says, surprising him. She’s far too young to be in for a career...adjustment, like him; she had to have gotten her training straight from the Academy. But he’s not entirely sure what to make of a command track nurse.

“Really. And you’re taking Tactical? What are you, bored?”

She looks at him sharply. “I want rank.” Her tone brooks no argument, no invitation to point out that nurses generally have no _use_ for rank. “I’m a nurse, Doctor, not a moron. I’ll be head nurse on a starship within five years, I guarantee it. Hell if I’m spending the rest of my career stalled there, taking orders from every schmuck who fancies himself my superior.”

“What about the schmucks who still are your superiors?”

Her eyes glint mischievously. “Prostate exams. Frequent prostate exams.”

Christine Chapel is, he thinks, going to give some poor, unsuspecting bastard of a doctor a number of headaches someday, if she’s not already. He laughs. “You really don’t need to use the formalities outside the hospital, you know,” he invites. Some urge makes him add, “Unless you prefer to be Nurse Chapel?”

She watches him for a moment, then turns to her screen. “Nah. Christine’ll do just fine.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

He’s not, for a number of weeks, entirely sure what to make of her. She’s... strange.

She _is_. Once he knows her name, he has to wonder how the hell he hadn’t noticed her earlier. The first couple of years, sure; she’d been zipping through her nursing classes while he’d been caught up in trying to twist his distinctly human-oriented medical background into something a little more overtly useful to an interplanetary organization.

But she’d been there, apparently, all along. Down the hall. _Around_. And she got her license, she mentions one day before class, at the beginning of the summer session, had transferred from the school clinic to the city hospital all the way back in June. He tries to tell himself that she has a bit of a way of fading into the background - she’s quiet, most of the time, focused on what’s right in front of her, be it a patient or a guest lecturer or a simulation - and it’s understandable. She doesn’t exactly stand out.

Except that he likes to think himself at least a little more observant than that. _Noticing_ things, the obscure things, the hidden and lurking things, is somewhat instrumental to the successful practice of medicine. The way she slipped about, right under his nose, for months - it bothers him.

He moves from bothered to flat-out fucking annoyed with himself as he gets used to her, gets the feel for her personality.

Christine, he comes to realize, hasn’t faded into the background a single day in her life. She just doesn’t go out of her way to be seen. By October, after knowing her just shy of a month, he decides that’s for the best.

Because the woman can be a goddamn handful at times.

She, just. She’s there suddenly, scattered through his life, making no sense. She’s incongruous. On the one hand, it takes him no time at all to determine that she is quite good at what she does, both following orders and taking appropriate initiative in patient care, with the straight-backed aplomb hammered into them by years of Starfleet protocol drills. He rapidly comes to look forward to the days their shifts coincide and their duty assignments are the same; it’s no small relief to be absolutely certain that his patients are in good hands even after he walks away.

On the other hand, it turns out she’s got an attitude the size of Texas, and it slips at times. He’s grown accustomed to the occasional spark of her wit when they’re sitting in class together, but she’s usually perfectly composed at work. It surprises him, the first time he see it happen. He walks up to the nurses’ station one evening at the end of a long shift, just wanting to drop off his charts and go home, sleep, and she’s there at the counter, saying something to Dr. Calloway. He notes that her hand is trembling as she gestures vehemently at a chart. He arrives just in time to hear Calloway interrupt.

“Nurse Chapel, next time you find yourself considering questioning one of my orders - _re_ consider. Carefully. Administer the spray.”

“Oh, spray yourself,” she snaps, not quite under her breath, and slips behind the desk. McCoy shrugs at the exasperated look that Calloway shoots him, turns his attention diplomatically to his own charts until the other man is gone. “You shouldn’t have said that,” he tells her quietly, when they’re alone.

She looks up at him with fire in her eyes. “Yeah, well, he shouldn’t be such an incompetent ass.”

He frowns at her, irritated. She’s going to get herself in a lot of trouble. “He’s an attending physician on duty, Chapel, and your job is follow his instructions.”

She shoots to her feet and shoves a chart in front of him. Her cheeks flush. “No, McCoy, my job is to do whatever I can to provide quality healthcare to people who are depending on us, while dealing with a never-ending stream of _crap_ from egomaniacs who think a medical degree means they can do no wrong. Look that over and if you think his orders should stand, _you_ do it. I’m going off duty.”

She storms off, leaving him to scroll curiously through the chart. Two minutes later, he corners Calloway in the doctor’s lounge, tosses the chart down in front of him. “Your patient is here being treated for persistent and severe hypertension. Do you have any idea what could happen if you put him on clarithromycin right now, or did you miss that day of basic pharmacology?”

Calloway flushes angrily. “Sheesh, McCoy, not you, too. That insubordinate little -”

“Probably just kept _your_ patient alive.” McCoy rolls his eyes and wonders how the hell he wound up acting as a playground monitor to over-sized children. “I’ll deal with Chapel, all right? And it’s up to you but I’d advise against filing a complaint - trust me, I know her. She wouldn’t hesitate to retaliate, and I gotta wonder just how much scrutiny you want on your records, here _and_ at any other hospital you’ve been at, if this is the kind of crap medicine you’re practicing.”

He leaves it at that. He signs off duty and changes quickly, gathers his things from his locker and walks to the tram station. She’s there, sitting on the bench, tapping her foot impatiently. “It’s handled,” he tells her, taking a seat next to her.

She folds her arms over her chest and stares straight ahead. “Great. Wonderful. _Perfect_.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you’re _welcome_. That was pretty damn unprofessional, you realize that, right?”

“You don’t know me well,” she says tightly, “so let me tell you something. I’m a nurse first, a Starfleet cadet second, and concerned about my fucking professional decorum somewhere after that. Sometimes I can do it all at once, and sometimes I prioritize. Any doctor who can’t deal with that can go - whatever. So Calloway makes my life miserable for awhile. _My_ blood pressure can take it.”

“He probably will. I know _I_ probably would, you pulled something like that with me.”

A tram approaches. She turns cool eyes on him. “If you gave me an order that caused me concern, and I pulled you aside privately to discuss it, I think _you’d_ listen to me. Kinda like you just did. So I doubt we’ll ever find out for sure.” The tram pulls in, bound for the far side of campus, towards the library. She stands; he doesn’t. “Good night.”

He watches her thoughtfully for a moment. She’s the woman he’s used to again, calm and contained. “Night,” he murmurs, and stares after her as she goes.

The next morning she slips into her seat in class with a muttered greeting as she loads the program they’d had to compile for homework. Her pitch and roll entries are off; he watches, amused despite himself, as her little holographic ship does an uncontrolled spin and careens straight into the enemy vessel. He glances at her, ready to offer a comforting word if she’s upset at her error.

She just purses her lips and “hmm”s softly. “Do you think,” she asks out of the corner of her mouth, “that’ll be worth partial credit? I did take the bastards out, after all.”

Something twists sharply in his chest, startling him. “Doubt it,” he says, and frowns.

“Damn.” She sighs and shifts her attention to his screen. “Ah, fuck it. Let’s see yours, then, Ace.”

His maneuver is precise and effective, if nothing spectacular; he’d made Jim check the work. But she smiles at him, pleased, impressed, her eyes crinkling. He doesn’t confess.

She’s a pain in the ass, he thinks, and a loose cannon apparently waiting to blow, but... she’s actually sort of pretty, sometimes, a little.

When she smiles.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Jim takes the Kobayashi Maru not long after that. McCoy goes in rolling his eyes at the bounce in Jim’s step, the bright-eyed, confident eagerness to take the damn thing by storm.

He comes out wondering if he should petition the academic board to create an award for the most spectacularly bone-headed, reckless, stubborn, _idiotic_ failure ever to cost a few hundred fake little lives, if only to find out what it should look like so he can get Jim drunk and have it tattooed on his forehead.

Jim stays in a funk about it for a week. Somewhere over the weekend, while McCoy is working double-shifts to help cover various vacations, he snaps out of it and leaves McCoy a rambling message about xenolinguistics, quantum gravity, and hamsters on wheels. Since it makes no sense whatsoever and he’s reasonably confident that Jim has not suddenly gone dabbling in designer stims, the explanation is that Jim has gotten drunk, gotten laid and gotten himself sorted out.

Sex: the Jim Kirk way of marking his path on the way to the next big thing. Sometimes McCoy thinks he should start selling tickets.

But the thing about Jim is - and it’s a close thing, to be sure, but McCoy is not too proud to admit it (to himself, at least; hell if he’s ever saying it out loud, to _anyone_ ) - the thing about Jim is that he is most likely largely responsible for the salvaging of McCoy’s last few shreds of sanity at a critical time. When he met Jim he was coming off a six week bender that had started with signing his divorce papers and his enlistment papers on the same day in two different - but similarly cramped and ugly - offices in Atlanta, and had ended in a cold sweat, vomiting into the bathtub of his motel room at six in the evening the day before he was to report, because the toilet was too fucking _small_ to aim for. He’d had just enough sense to switch to coffee (mostly) for the rest of the night, just enough of his wits left to grasp that it was better to show up to Starfleet a fucked up phobic mess than a sloppy drunk.

At least when it came to being _open_ about his flaws, that is.

And then there was this kid, blood-flecked and bruised and smelling like crap, mostly quiet but now and then going all hyper-active on him, wiggling in his seat and jiggling his leg and sending a clumsy elbow right into McCoy’s side, three different times.

They were on the ground and had parted ways, right off the shuttle, before McCoy realized he hadn’t panicked a single time. He’d mostly just wanted to strangle Jim with his own harness.

A few hours later Jim was there, grasping his arm on the way into the first orientation seminar and tugging him into two empty seats.

"I need a place to stay for a few days," he announced. "They weren't exactly expecting me until this morning. Details, yadda yadda, you know. Your floor happen to be free? Awesome."

McCoy remains, to this day, pretty sure that that's when it happened: that's when Jim Kirk saved his damn life, just by being obnoxious and unpredictable and dragging him out of his own head.

Christine asks him the day after the test, idly, how it went. When he looks at her, surprised because he doesn’t recall mentioning it, she nods sheepishly at his console. “You had your schedule pulled up the other day,” she explains. “I saw the notation.”

“Oh.” He pauses. Something about being the subject of her unobtrusive but keen observational skills, about her paying attention and remembering a detail of his life...it makes him feel something. He’s not sure what. He’s not sure he likes it. “It had the upside,” he finally replies dryly, “of confirming that I’ll take a medical bay over a seat on the bridge, any day.”

She peers at him curiously. “Yet here you are.”

“Favor for a friend,” he mutters. “We all have our weak points.”

She hums under her breath and turns back to her screen as the class begins. “I’m not sure I’d call being that good a friend a weak point,” she says quietly. “I think I’d call it admirably uncommon.”

McCoy stares at her until his console beeps insistently for input.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The quarter ends in December. Jim takes the test again. They all die again. McCoy’s days, free of classes, revolve around work and Jim, both long series of hours devoted to identifying problems and devising solutions.

At least with his patients there’s frequently a moderate to good chance of succeeding. Jim, no matter how many times he hashes through his performance, is doomed. McCoy, no matter how many times he tries to get Jim to let it go, already, is in a similar state.

Shortly thereafter Christine slams into the scrub room for a surgical assignment - he’d requested her; he’s found her competent presence eases the tension that threatens to boil over each time he undertakes a difficult procedure - in an utter state, starts yammering about the end of her career. He wonders, wearily, who she talked back to this time and how bad the fallout is going to be.

But then she regales him with red tape and crotch fungus, of all things, her voice low and strong and furious. He’s never heard so many words out of her mouth at once. It’s a shame, he thinks, that it always seems to take anger to bring her so vibrantly to life.

Later he’ll blame the novelty of her outburst for his fast decision to haul her upstairs. He’ll try, anyway. His “anything you ever need, McCoy, you let me know” from the Chief has been a well-guarded ace in the hole for him for awhile, held aside for some possible time when the casual foundation of their work relationship just won’t cut it for what he needs.

He’d earned it by giving the Chief the name of a divorce attorney over a year back. The name of his ex-wife’s divorce attorney, to be exact.

Realistically, though, his actions are based on the fact that right there and then, he needs a feat that the hospital bureaucracy is generally dead set against allowing to happen. He needs Christine, possibly the strongest woman he’s ever met, to stop standing there with too much moisture in her eyes. He needs... to be able to make something better for her.

He decides to blame it on days of frustration with Jim. But in the turbolift down she tries to thank him and he realizes, with all the warning of a sucker punch to the gut, that he doesn’t want it, her gratitude, her subdued appreciation.

He wants _her_.

He clenches his jaw, smells her perfume. It’s light, a citrus scent. It takes him by surprise, the flare of sudden lust, the wondering of 'what if'. He’s gotten used to feeling mildly attracted to her, to enjoying her company and noting, absently, when she looks particularly pretty, to sometimes feeling the urge to brush his hand to hers, feel her skin. She’s attractive and young and kind and smart; there’s nothing so out of the ordinary about the brief thoughts he’s entertained, at the back of his mind.

But - she's not his type, not at all. Not like this.

She's too damned much _like_ him, for one thing. He's always found comfort in women with a decidedly feminine behavior to them, has always found they best smooth his rougher edges and bring out a better side. While they last, at least, which.... Well. Christine, more and more as he’s gotten used to their casual acquaintance, brings out sharp retorts and the easy sarcasm his thought patterns tend towards; she’s an easy target because she takes it all, gives it right back in return.

She’s a lot like Jim, too, in that way, and Jim is about all the levels of crazy and chaotic his social life can take.

And for another thing, she's a wisp of a thing, inches shorter than him and delicate, barely on the right side of avoiding frail. Jocelyn almost matched him in height and was strong, a healthy, farm-raised woman with plenty of muscle layered into her slender frame. He traces the preference back to Emony Dax, when he’d met her in Mississippi - god, but Emony had made up for being ridiculously short with the sheer power she'd packed into her body, honed by years and years of training.

Christine is nothing like them, or any other woman he's ever dated. She looks like she might jump if you said 'boo', or snap in two at the slightest pressure, but he's never even seen her flinch at a trauma victim and her mouth - Christ, but her mouth can be _distinctly_ unladylike.

And her hair is the wrong color, too. He likes redheads. Brunettes. He doesn’t really care for blondes.

Except that apparently he does, a realization that bothers him when tries to pick it apart.

It pisses him off, really, that for the second time in less than three years, some fucking _kid_ is teaching him things about himself he never even knew.

Every so often he finds himself just goddamn sick of Starfleet and its menagerie of baby geniuses. Annoyed, he blows Christine off with a vague comment about drinks and gets back to work.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

For all that he can - and does, often - still surprise, Jim is mostly a creature of habit. McCoy knows by now his patterns and rhythms, can make fairly educated guesses at most times as to what Jim will be getting up to. He works hard during the weeks, goes to classes, studies, pesters his assortment of friends, and he goes out on the weekends, drinks moderately, and usually gets laid - sometimes more than once, and sometimes by more than one person.

The adventure that comes with being Jim’s friend is usually a matter of the small details: exactly _where_ McCoy will get hauled to on a Friday night, exactly _when_ Jim will next pop up, exactly _what_ inane idea he’ll spout out next.

McCoy can deal with that. Usually. It’s give and take, his friendship with Jim, and if he has to give an oft-extraordinary amount of barely mustered patience to the kid, what he takes in return - the loyalty, the camaraderie, the comfort of being reminded he’s not actually past his prime and can still have fun in life - is plenty to balance out the scales.

Jim has really only shocked him beyond words a single time. He has no idea what might have happened their first year at the Academy; they didn’t really know each quite well enough yet. But their second year, it was his door Jim showed up to on his birthday, blood alcohol already through the roof and a half-full bottle clutched in his hand, slurring through a story about the USS Kelvin and being born under a bad sign.

All McCoy had been able to do was listen, feed him water, give him a few sprays to lighten the inevitable hangover, and tuck him into bed. As he settled into his armchair for a long, uncomfortable night, Jim had said: “Gonna live forever or die young, Bones. Just wanna know which one already,” and finally passed out.

Jim avoided him for weeks after that. McCoy knew better than to ever bring it up.  But Jim’s birthday rolls around again, and McCoy finds himself on edge when Jim hauls him off campus for a night out, clear-eyed and completely at ease. He can’t quite bring himself to believe, given everything Jim had mumbled on about last year, that this is going to go very well.

They have dinner in the Wharf. Jim is relaxed, flirts with the waitress. McCoy rolls his eyes and Jim just shrugs. “Can’t all be paragons of virtue like you, Bones. Some of us poor, helpless bastards are slaves to our dicks.”

“Slaves, my ass,” he mutters. “Willing volunteer, is more like it.”

“Po-ta-to, po-tah-to,” Jim says easily. “Be honest, though - was she totally into me, or what?”

Later they walk up the water’s edge, trying to decide where to go. When McCoy sees Christine, walking alone with her hands tucked into her jacket pockets, things go still in his mind. Her hair is down, waving loosely over her shoulders, blowing in breeze.

Christ, but she’s beautiful, he thinks.

When she catches sight of him, she smiles and alters her path to approach. “Not working, not studying,” she teases in greeting. “What is this, a fit of madness?”

“I could wonder the same about you.” he says.

She shrugs. “Restless. Close enough, when it comes to me.”

Jim looks back and forth between them, hops from one foot to the other in the cold air before giving up and thrusting out a hand. “Hey,” he says smoothly. “I’m Jim Kirk, your new friend. And you are?”

McCoy grits his teeth at the appearance of Jim’s practiced charm. Christine just blinks and takes his hand. “Christine Chapel,” she says slowly, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth. “Your...new friend?”

“Any friend of Bones is a friend of mine.”

Her forehead crinkles. “Um. We may be sorta dorky over in Medical, but I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call bones my -”

Jim laughs. “He’s Bones. You’re a doctor?”

She flicks her amused gaze at McCoy. He stares at her in return, embarrassed for some stupid reason. She looks back at Jim and he resents it, the loss of her attention. “Ah,” she says. “Bones. Got it. And no, I’m a nurse.”

“Weeeeell,” Jim drawls. “Christine Chapel, dorky nurse, I think you need to come get a drink with us. We have a friendship to catch up on, after all.” She hesitates; Jim cranks it up with a grin. “You’re already behind on friend points, you know, forgetting my birthday like this. Awful, hurtful thing to do. You have to come just to make it up to me.”

She looks at McCoy. “I do owe you one,” she ventures, a question in her tone. McCoy looks at her unhappily. He’s been trying for weeks to put this away, this clutch of desire, and it’s gone fairly well - when she’s not in his face, at least, like she is every goddamn day at work. It’s bad enough with that, and with the knowledge that they’ll share another class starting tomorrow, but now she’s bleeding across into spaces she hadn’t previously occupied.

And she’s doing it right when he’s braced for Jim to go completely haywire. McCoy is pretty sure this is a damn bad idea. “Yeah,” he says tightly. “Of course you should come.”

He lets Christine and Jim choose their destination while he tries to talk himself up for this. It’ll be all right, he tells himself. Hell, there’s even the possibility that her presence will keep Jim in check.

He should have fucking known better, he tells himself later. He has spent a jaw-clenching two hours watching the degree of Jim’s flirting grow in direct proportion to the drinks he’s putting away, watching Christine handle it with equanimity, watching them have a fucking _thumb war_ , for God’s sake, while he watches and resents the hell out Jim being the one to get to touch her.

He feels a petty relief when Jim goes to get another drink and doesn’t come back; it’s much easier to be a good friend from afar, and in his words, when they’re alone and her only remarks on Jim are in terms that are more a reflection of _him_. He finds himself watching the play of light on her skin as they talk, the movement of bones inside her hand, and he has to resist an unbidden urge to wrap his fingers around her small wrist and pull, discover if she’s the type of woman to dab perfume on the thin skin there.

He doesn’t like that she confesses to isolating herself from people like it’s no big deal.

He does like that she rises to his bait and lets him taunt her into calling him a friend - it’s _something_ , at least - and that when she stands, it’s with a handful of credits instead of her jacket.

And then Jim Kirk, wunderkind, finally strikes. The next few minutes pass in a flush of embarrassment and, when Jim gets obscene, flat rage. He’s never, for all that Jim has irritated him in that past, actually felt like smashing the kid’s face in, but it’s a near thing now.

 Even nearer, when Christine _puts_ her fucking _hand_ on his cock to zip him up. And when they’re outside and Jim shoves his goddamn tongue in her mouth -

If he has a coronary, McCoy swears to himself, grabbing Jim by the hair and hauling him off Christine, he’s for damn sure going to kill Jim as quickly as possible before he croaks.

 Getting Jim home and tossed into bed is a miserable hour or so of McCoy’s life that he’s never getting back. He entertains thoughts of leaving Jim on a street corner to sleep it off; hell, he thinks, it’s not like Christine is ever going to talk to him again, anyway. Might as well go all-out and horrify her some more. If there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear, it’s that Christine has a low tolerance for pure and utter bullshit.

She must hate Jim. And she must, by extension, be pretty damn disgusted with him. He waits for it, for the cool brush-off, after they dump Jim in his room and start walking to their dorm.

Instead she elbows him lightly in the side. “Look, if you’re mad at him for my sake, let it go.”

He can’t quite contain the blur of his emotions, none of them good. “Why should I? You’re nice as can be to him and he just - god, he’s an asshole. Such a goddamn asshole.”

“That’s wasn’t him.”

“That _was_ him, just drunk as a skunk.” He doesn’t get why she’s doing this, why she’s going out of her way over Jim. Then she says, “It’s his birthday. Can’t be that happy a day for him. Cut him some slack, just this once,” and he stops short, stunned.

 That she’d put it together, most of it, isn’t what amazes him. It’s that she put it together and came out in the right place - not “poor Jim Kirk, let me wash away all your sins” but “not his finest hour, whatever.” He tries to tell her what that means, comes up short at “generous.”

Christine cracks a joke and smiles at him and it’s familiar and it’s easy and the immensity of his relief makes him uneasy. The night has highlighted for him just how _not_ in control of his emotions he is, when it comes to her, and he’s not happy about the months ahead of him, the continued struggle to rein in this thing that she doesn’t want.

And at her door...she invites him in. She distinctly, emphatically, and when he hesitates, impatiently invites him in. He tries - he _tries_ \- to do the right thing; he opens his mouth to try to, at the very least, dodge this just once and give her time to consider whatever bizarre, abrupt idea is running through her head.

“Shut up,” she tells him. Her lips, brushing his, are cold and a little dry. “Want to come in?”

His entire damned vocabulary reduces, in an instant, to “yes.” She smiles and nods and turns away and that’s it, he can’t do it anymore. He can’t not grab her, can’t not kiss her hard, discover what she tastes like. “Damn it,” he says between clumsy, biting kisses, his head spinning with the rush of this happening, “have you got any idea how long I’ve wanted you?”

He picks her up. She wraps herself around him. He stumbles into her room.

She has a fucking _roommate_. Christine rips her mouth away from his and orders her out, breathless. McCoy laughs and eyes the dark-haired woman over Christine’s shoulder, twitches his brows at her wide-eyed shock. His fingers slip against Christine’s back, her warm skin; his focus blurs. He nuzzles behind her ear and mouths the soft flesh there through the scurry of activity, and then they’re alone. “You know, I have my own room,” he points out, feeling faintly guilty.

Christine fumbles at the buttons of his coat. “She’s always going on about how I need to get laid. She can damn well clear out and let it happen.”

This woman, he thinks, laughing and setting her down so he can work quickly at his clothes, this woman and her well-concealed, mile-wide streak of sass. “What’s she care about your sex life?””

She pulls her shirt off. Her torso arches forward with the motion. Her bra is plain, practical, flesh-toned. His mouth goes dry. “She’s a free spirit,” she tells him, “and thinks I’m an uptight bitch in bad need of a good hard fuck. Her words.”

Christ, but how he hopes that part of it is true. He closes eyes briefly against the revelation of her breasts, her perfectly average, ordinary, goddamn beautiful breasts. He tugs his own shirt off. “Yours?”

He barely registers her cheerful adoption of the assessment as her own, lost in the reality of her shedding the remainder of her clothes and lying in front of him, naked as a newborn babe. Her smile flashes, an echo of the first sly, sneaky one she ever gave him. “Care to treat my condition, Doctor?”

He hadn’t even _known_ he had that particular kink. His cock throbs and he has to pause, get control of himself. “Shit, Christine,” he gets out. “You can’t say stuff like that or this is gonna be over real fast.”

She shimmies back and touches herself, uninhibited, her eyes on him bright with need, with _want_. He remembers the first time he saw her, really saw her, remembers thinking that she was nothing remarkable.

He thinks now that he may in fact be the _stupidest_ man on the planet. He kicks off his pants and goes after her, like he’s wanted to for weeks, like he should have wanted to for months. There’s lost time between them, he knows, lost opportunities that can only be marked down to him being a fool, and he wants fiercely to undo that damage, to make it not matter.

 Christine lets him in readily, without pause, splays herself willingly to his mouth. He feels a flash of relief at her comfort, her obvious experience; he’d worried, absently, that she may have closed herself off for just that long, just that thoroughly. But she knows what she wants, her fingers sifting through his hair and guiding him, scratching lightly at his neck, her hips moving in search of more. She’s still fairly dry; he thinks, I can fix that. He drags her up across his lap.

She goes wild in his hands, under his lips, his tongue. She babbles out her pleasure, and instructions, and her release spills over his tastebuds, makes him seek out more. He sucks a bruise into the soft, thin skin of her inner thigh while she trembles and slowly relaxes, then eases her down and draws her up against him. He fists his cock and teases her with it, says her name, slips into her, just a little. Her pulse beats strong and fast in her neck.

She makes him say rough things, things he's never been quite comfortable saying when he's been with a woman. Emony'd tried to get him to let go, bless her heart, but their time together had been too brief for someone even of her bold, adventurous spirit to finish coaxing him away from the gawky virgin he'd been and complete the face-first shove she gave him towards being the man she seemed to see in front of her. He was nineteen years old and a science geek, for Christ's sake; he didn't even know how to have good _polite_ conversation with a woman, much less put voice to the tumble of thoughts he'd have in bed.

Jocelyn'd just been - he doesn't even know. The woman could birth a baby colt without a care in the world, he’s seen her do it, but fuck if they left the lights on during sex. He thinks, now that he's gained enough distance from the mess of his father and his marriage dying swiftly on each other's heels, that their sex life should have, perhaps, been a clue from the start that he and Jocelyn were not exactly a match made in heaven.

Their personalities should probably have been another. He’d loved her, desperately, but they hadn’t exactly suited in a number of way.

But here, with Christine, he has the benefit of experience and the frustration of long years of making do or just plain going without, and he has her, trembling in his arms, making soft sounds of wanting, being so completely unbidden under his touch - “Gonna fuck you, honey, just like you need,” he says against her neck, and she shakes, keens for it. “I’ll take care you,” he promises, and he means it, and he pushes up hard.

The slick, tight heat of her body around him, the anguished, grateful cry that tumbles from her throat - Christ, but he nearly loses it right then. He moves slowly, trying to stretch it out. “You feel so damn good,” he says. Because it’s true, because she deserves to know, because it makes his heart pound to say it. “Could almost believe you’ve never taken a cock before, you’re so damn tight. Been too long, sweetheart, hasn’t it? Tell me.”

Her skin goes blotchy, red flaming up her face. “Before - before I enlisted.”

He remembers Jim’s hand on hers, the flush of irritation at just that playful and innocent contact with another man. He plunges into her harder, deeper, bites out, “Good. Means I don’t need to wonder who here’s had his filthy, worthless hand on you.” She lets out sharp, squeaking moans and goes rigid. “Oh God, honey,” he breathes, “yeah, let it go. Just like that, baby. That’s a good girl.”

She meets his eyes, says his name, mumbles. He kisses her because he has to, no choice about it; his hands tease at her breasts. She digs her fingernails into his shoulders, eight small slashes of heat and pain, and she moves steadily with him. She’s wrecked from it all, slippery with sweat and beginning to cry. She begs.

He draws her close to him and lets go. Everything narrows to the aching need, to her body against him, around him. He breathes hard and holds her and takes her, fast, lost to the pressure building in his cock, his balls. Release is a snapping thread, a blissful relief. Christine’s mouth moves against his shoulder, lazy and soft.

McCoy holds her for what feels like a long time, and murmurs her name, and touches her. He doesn’t want to let her go.

What he does want is - is too much to fully contemplate, not while his body is still tingling and his thoughts are going rapidly drowsy. He eases her onto the bed and parts from her, feels a tightness in his chest at her protest. In the bathroom he finds a cloth and runs it under the sink, and looks at himself in the mirror. He looks strung out; he looks like Jim after a long weekend. He doesn’t recognize himself.

He rubs absently at the deep crescents pressed into one of his shoulders as he goes back out. The tightness worsens as he cleans her gently, as she reaches for him.

He is, he thinks as he kisses her into sleep, completely and utterly in fucking love with Christine Chapel.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Something - the sound of the door, a clearing throat - jolts him awake. Christine is stretched out next to him, the slim line of her body trapped by the cocoon of his leg slung over hers, his arm across her waist. Her hair tickles his nose and he rears his head back, frowns at the dim light beginning to brighten the room. He looks around.

The roommate - Elsa, his mind dredges up - is standing at the end of the bed, staring evenly at him. He blinks at her groggily and she taps her wrist, jerks her head towards the door. McCoy glances at Christine and nods. “Give me a minute,” he mutters, “I’ll be out of your hair.”

She turns and leaves again, the door swishing quietly. He looks back down at Christine. She’s still heavily asleep, her eyes flickering under the lids, her chest expanding and contracting evenly with each breath. The air whistles just a shade in her sinuses. Her body, where it touches his, is sleep-warm, comforting.

He eases away carefully and slips out from under the blankets he’d pulled over them before falling asleep. His clothes are in a fairly tidy heap on the floor and he yanks them on, grabs his socks and shoes, turns to go. He takes a last look, considering waking her to kiss, to say goodbye; she’s curled in on herself, fetal, edging into the space he’d just occupied.

He leaves her be.

Elsa is in the hall, leaning against the far wall with her eyes closed. “I’m really, really sorry,” he says once the door shuts behind him. “Honestly, I can’t tell you -”

She yawns and shakes her head. “S'fine, I slept at a friend's. But I need to get ready for class now. Scram.”

She goes back in and he trudges, barefoot, to his own room. It's a little past seven. He showers, standing for a long time, still, his hands pressed to the shower wall, water pounding against his neck and back. He tries to think but it's all a mess of too many details, logistical concerns, professional concerns - and, at the root of it, a lightness of being he's scared to let himself explore, in case in turns out to be more fragile than it feels.

A lot of it, too, boils down to wanting to go back, grab Christine, and bring her here to hide away for the rest of the day.

Instead he dresses, reviews his schedule, gathers everything he'll need until the next time he can return to his room, and goes sets out. As he leaves he can't help but glance toward Christine's door, and feel mildly, irrationally disappointed that she doesn't choose that moment to step out of her room.

He lets himself into Jim’s room around eight-thirty and notes gratefully that Jim's roommate isn’t there. He stomps over to deactivate the sun filters. “Wake up, Jim,” he barks as light fills the room.

Jim groans loudly and pulls his pillow out from under his head, crams it over his eyes. “Augh, no, make it go away.”

“Not a chance, dumbass. Sit up and talk to me, I don’t got all day.”

“God, _mom_ , what do you _want_?” Jim peeks out at him. “No offense, Bones, but I’m hungover and not particularly wild about yours being the first face I see in the morning.”

McCoy grinds his teeth together and counts to ten. He will not let Jim ruin his mood; he’s given Jim just about everything else a friendship could demand over the last few years, but he absolutely will not let him have this. “Quit your bitching. How much do you remember about last night?”

With a sigh, Jim slowly sits up and scratches his matted hair. “I dunno. Went to the bar, Christine was there - she’s cute, by the way, _real_ sweet woman - there was this chick who offered to... oh. _Fuck_.”

“Uh-huh.” McCoy crosses his arms and lifts his eyebrow. “Keep it coming.”

“I don’t wanna.” Jim groans and flops back again. “Does she want to kill me?”

“She was actually remarkably calm about the entire thing, not that you deserve it.”

“Do _you_ want to kill me?”

“Yeah, but I’ll refrain if you get your ass out of bed and apologize to her, _now_.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course, you got it.” Jim crawls out of bed with a yawn, scratches his balls as he stumbles over to the desk. “What’s her last name again?”

“Chapel. I'm letting you off light, you know - she should be in class right now. You can leave a message.”

"Geez, you know her schedule and everything? Just how bad do you have it for this chick and why the hell did I know nothing about her until -"

" _Jim_."

"Okay! Stop yelling." Jim calls up the student directory and finds Christine's personal comm link, leans heavily on one arm against his desk as it connects. "Christine, it's Jim." He coughs, trying to get the scratch out of his throat. "So listen. My recollections are, ah... _fuzzy_ , at best, but it's been brought to my attention that last night I may have -"

McCoy throws a shoe at his back. Jim jumps and glares at him. He glares back.

"- okay, no, I definitely behaved towards you in a manner unbefitting a woman of your excellent and _superior_ calibre." He rolls his eyes in McCoy's direction, but then looks away and lowers his voice. "Hope you can forgive me. I am really sorry."

He cuts the transmission and glares at McCoy again. "That was completely against my personal code. An apology from me is _planned_ , Bones. It’s smooth. It leaves a good impression. It’s a rare and special event that deserves advance consideration!”

“Yeah,” McCoy snaps, “so’s fellatio. _Usually_. Embrace spontaneity, Jim - you sure as hell did last night.”

Jim winces and crawls back into his bed. “Got me there. But I don’t like you lecturing me on being spontaneous. You’re s’posed to be my stick-in-the-mud. Dunno what I’d do if you got adventurous all of a sudden.”

McCoy can’t help but laugh at him. “Fuck off.”

“Ermph. Goin’ back to sleep. Sorry I ruined your night.”

He flushes despite himself. “Don’t worry about it. You didn’t.”

Mistake. Jim, whose brain half the time seems to run on equal parts innuendo and complex mathematics, pauses for a second with his face smashed in a pillow and then sits bolt upright, looks at him sharply with blood-shot eyes. “Bones. Did you-”

McCoy turns for the door. “Good _bye_ , Jim.”

Jim fucking _crows_ behind him. “Holy shit, you did! Bones, you pathetic son of a bitch, you finally got some. I can’t even - oh, god, is this what being a proud papa feels like? Aw, hey, come back! You have to tell me - was it good? Is she the firecracker I think she is? Are you gonna -”

“Go to class, Jim!” he hollers as the door slides shut.

The morning is vastly like any other morning. He has breakfast, goes by the neuro labs to put in some work on his thesis. He goes to Comparative XB and waits, expectantly, for Christine to arrive and drop into the seat next to him, like before, familiar. She doesn’t show and he shrugs it off, hopes she just slept in. It happens. He’ll give her notes when he sees her at work.

He’s not entirely prepared, when he does, for the blaze of - of something undefined and wholly good that grips him when she skids straight into him at the entrance to the staff locker rooms. He touches her shoulders and resists the urge to kiss her, just smiles instead.

She dodges him, looking flustered, and he’s confused by it but backs off. He’s on trauma intake for the entire evening; there are no major cases brought in, but an hour into the shift they get an entire class of students from a nearby technical school. He spends most of his night treating smoke inhalation and minor electrical burns, cursing reckless kids and their bizarre experiments.

He doesn’t see her, not once, during an entire shared shift. He can’t recall a time that’s happened, since the day he met her.

She’s still signed in, somewhere, when he finishes up and decides to wait for her outside. The night is bitterly cold but he sticks it out, and the hitch in his breath when she strolls out of the hospital, the ache in his lungs, has nothing to do with the weather. “Hi,” she greets him. There’s something lurking in her gaze, a reluctance that puts him on edge. “Rough shift?”

It occurs to him, at last, that she might be annoyed that he hadn’t woken her. “Not particularly,” he replies. Her nose is reddening in the cold air, her breath gusting out, white, in front of her lips. “Just frustratingly long. I want to apologize to you, for leaving like I -”

She stops him. What she says is: "It's not like I asked you to stay."

What he hears is: "You poor, stupid son of a bitch. What did you think this was?" It hits him like a punch in the face.

She says something else that he misses in his surprise, and she runs off. He calls after her, automatically but uselessly, and he waits another ten minutes but she doesn't come back.

McCoy understands, a slow burn of a realization, that she's not going to, now or ever. That she never really came to him in the first place, that this is not, after all, what he'd thought it could be.

This is just her, fumbling through the motions of trying to let him down easy.

It makes him want, instinctively, to go after her. To find her, to make her listen and understand. He wants to tell her every damned thing she’s ever made him feel, from frustrated to annoyed to intrigued to helpless. Instead he finds himself walking slowly back to campus, wandering north toward the marinas instead of cutting more to the west. By the time he reaches the harbor, things feel clearer in his mind.

Okay, he thinks. It's - okay. Because he's not going to do this. He's thirty years old and on the verge of going fast to other places, literally. He doesn't have time to waste on fighting for a relationship in which both participants want different things.

He's never been interested in that in the first place. There's a fucking _reason_ he hadn't laid hands on anyone but himself in - God, it’d been more than four years. Jocelyn, still heavily pregnant, before everything went all to hell. She’d gone into labor the same day. It makes him sick, now, being able to pinpoint the date.

McCoy stops at a public comm terminal and accesses the Academy exchange, routes through to Christine's personal channel. Part of him hopes she’ll be there, wants to see her. A larger part is relieved when he's prompted to leave audio only.

"Christine," he makes himself say. He stares out over the dark water, sees lights moving in the darkness, boats passing each other. "I get it, all right? Relax. We're - damn it. We're on the same page here." It's a giant mistake, he wants to say. It's a fucking waste, but have it your own damn way. He merely adds, "It's for the best. I'll see you around, I suppose."

He doesn’t sleep at all that night.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

He doesn’t see Christine for a couple of days. Their class only meets twice a week; their shifts don’t happen to coincide. It’s almost - almost - like she’s not even there.

He works on putting it away. It’s not an easy task and he knows, even as he does it, that he’s going about it the wrong way. The trouble, he knows, is that he’s always been monumentally stupid when it comes to women. He makes bad choices. He fucks it up.

In college he’d developed a bit of a thing for his lab partner in Organic Chem, the kind of girl who could recite the periodic table while turning cartwheels, literally, and had blown off studying for a major exam to go watch her compete in a gymnastics tournament.

He’d met Emony and in a flash, weeks of his life were gone to the whirlwind of excitement she carried around with her like an invisible friend. He went a bit crazy from it all, grades slipping and the whole bit, and he came out on the other side of it changed.

He’d thought, more than once, of leaving school to go with her wherever she went next. She told him in the same breath that she was going back to her homeworld and that she would miss him always, forever. She kissed him and they had sex once more and then she was gone, and he didn’t understand for a long time that he hadn’t done anything to drive her away, that it hadn’t been love in the first place.

It had been fun, and amazing, but it hadn’t been love. That was a slow wait through the end of college, through medical school, through a short but steady string of relationships that were easy but ultimately not enough.

And then there was Jocelyn. When he met her he was finishing a short stint at a neuro research clinic outside Chattanooga, getting trained by one of the best surgeons ever to run off and hide in the back country, and earning extra money by helping out the _real_ country doctor in town, who was still sharp as a tack but not quite as mobile as he used to be. A call came in and McCoy went out, and when he walked into the barn on the Fisher farm, Jocelyn’s father was passed out in a pile of hay being seen to by a couple of stable hands. Jocelyn herself had her arm shoved elbow-deep inside a mare’s birth canal to coax out a stubborn foal. She’d looked up at him, her dusty face streaked with sweat and tears. “Unless you’re the vet,” she’d said, and her voice had cracked, “your patient is the one over there.”

He fell for her, hard and fast and, this time, real.

They married, procreated, and divorced in the space of two years. Now, years further down the line, McCoy is still surprised most of all by the speed with which everything spiraled out of control. The speed, and the fault he couldn’t recognize then but has to acknowledge as his now. His father died two months after Joanna was born and just a month shy of a cure. Now, at least, McCoy can see that Jocelyn, strong in her own ways but struggling under a heap of burdens, was abruptly faced with a husband who moved swiftly from grieving to blaming himself and lashing out at anyone, everyone, to drain away some of the anger and guilt, to make it bearable.

She lost patience fast.

His anger over that has lessened, some. She had an infant to care for, a lifetime of responsibility stretching out ahead of her, and if he made anything clear through his words, his actions, it was probably that the man she'd married, difficult enough in the best of times, was not coming back for a long time, if ever. She asked him for a divorce on the first day of summer.

He'd just looked at her, his wife with his daughter on her hip, and nodded shortly. "Fine."

His reaction is, in hindsight, probably what made her decide to screw him with his pants on.

And now he’s here, doing it again, giving up without a fight. It’s not even that he thinks he could necessarily have changed anything that happened, or that he could still change this. But he could, if he tried, figure it out well enough that he won’t have to look back on this, too, as a mystery to be unraveled long after the fact before he can get on with life.

 _If_ he tried.

But he just tells Jim, who attempts to pry with laughter in his eyes, to let it go, and avoids him for awhile. He tells Christine, who slips back into their old rhythms, things like “hello” and “nice night,” things like “I’ll believe it when I see a _decent_ cross-planetary phylogenetic study” and “start him on diazepam, Chapel, let’s see how he does.”

He ignores how sad her eyes are, every time she looks at him. If he notices - _when_ he notices - he sees pity, and it makes him sick.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Jim gives him a few weeks to spin his wheels and cope, and then calls complete and utter bullshit. “So you liked a woman and she didn’t like you back,” he says impatiently in the library one day. “It happens! Time to move on. We need you back in the real world, Bones.”

McCoy clenches his jaw and gathers his notes. It’s rich, coming from Jim, the guy who can love ‘em and leave ‘em and somehow, every single time, walk away with the most bizarrely intimate-yet-platonic friendships McCoy has ever seen. He would take heart in the never-ending saga Jim has going with the Uhura girl, except that he knows perfectly damn well that that’s a game to Jim, has been for the past two and a half years.

Sometimes he thinks that’s just how Jim lives his life: if he can’t win the battle, he just turns it into a game. Jim can be a remarkably good sport about pretty much anything he convinces himself doesn’t truly matter.

Other things, however... McCoy walks outside and down the steps, annoyed that at some point while he’s been inside studying, the afternoon has shifted from overcast to sunny. He’s been enjoying the weather; it’s given him an excuse to stay indoors and be irritable. Now it’s just clear, and he’s sure tomorrow will be even worse. He glances at Jim, who’s in top form, as bright as the sky overhead. “Why are you so happy?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do.” He wouldn’t, McCoy thinks uncharitably; to get why it’s an issue, he’d have to grasp the concept that not everyone in the world is so readily able to let things slide off their backs.

Jim ignores him in favor of leering at some passing cadets, then goes laser-sharp in his focus. “I’m taking the test again.”

For the love of - “You gotta be kidding me.”

“Yeah, tomorrow morning, and I want you there.” There’s an edge to Jim’s voice, a warning: self-indulgent playtime is over.

Which, whatever. He has been sulking, and Jim has been putting up with it, and he can even admit to himself that Jim might, just might, have a point about coming back to the real world. But - this? No. “You know, I’ve got better things to do than watch you embarrass yourself for a third time. I’m a doctor, Jim; I’m busy!”

“Bones, it doesn’t bother you that no one’s ever passed the test?”

Fuck, he wants to say, a lot of things bother him. For a few, he’s still pretty hung up on death, disease and, despite the extensive therapy foisted upon him by Starfleet, the impending reality of being assigned to a goddamn _space_ ship. He just sighs instead. “Jim, it’s the Kobayashi Maru. _No_ one passes the test and no one goes back for seconds, let alone thirds.”

There is, as he should damn well know by now, no arguing with Jim when he’s got an idea in his head. McCoy clears his schedule and absently notes to buy Jim a drink sometime for trying, for doing his best.

Jim swings by to get him in the morning and they have time to kill so they sit out by the water outside his dorm. Jim won’t quit playing with his stupid apple; McCoy wishes he’d just eat the thing, already. “Why aren’t you nervous?”

“Why should I be nervous?” Jim says easily. “No scenario is unbeatable, Bones. I figured it out.” He suddenly lifts his arm and waves. “Speaking of which...”

McCoy looks up and promptly starts planning Jim’s slow and painful death. Christine, approaching, is as beautiful and painful to look at as ever. She sits next to Jim; McCoy grits his teeth. Her voice is steady and clear as she talks to Jim about him beating the test. “Will you give me an autograph after?” she teases. “I’d love to be able to prove I knew you when.”

“Better than that - come out with us tonight. It’s gonna be a night to celebrate.” McCoy hates the way he can do that - drop a bombshell, announce that the world is ending, screw his best friend six ways from Sunday - in the most casual of tones. “I’ll behave myself,” Jim promises.

McCoy looks at Christine. He wants her to say no, wants her to do what she’s proven so adept at doing and keep things from coming to a head.

He wants her to say yes. He wants any second near her he can get. He frowns out at a sunspot on the water as Christine agrees and Jim heads off, calling for him. “You don’t need to do this,” he feels compelled to say.

“I want to.”

He looks at her and she smiles and for a second it looks like her real one, instead of the stiffly polite crap he’s been faced with for weeks. Retina burn, he tells himself. His mood, lifted for the barest instant, goes foul again. “It’s his third time taking the damn thing,” he mutters. “He’s gonna fail, and it’s gonna be ugly and depressing. Just because I have to sit ringside from the whole damn circus doesn’t mean anyone else should.”

“Oh, stop. We’ll cheer him up and celebrate it being a beautiful day, instead. Go on, get on with you. And relax. I have a feeling - good things are going to happen today.” He gazes at her, at the exposed stretch of her throat as she tips her face toward the sky, at the fan of her light eyelashes.

They just did, he thinks. He’ll take what he can get; it’s all he has left.

Jim takes the test. He beats it.

Everything goes rapidly to shit, and McCoy just really can't find it within himself to be surprised.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

There's a not-inconsiderable part of him that's thoroughly pissed at Jim for his stunt with the Kobayashi Maru. You arrogant asshole, part of him wants to rail, you can't get through life just changing the rules when they don't suit you. It's a bedrock principle for McCoy: equations either solve or they don't; treatments either work or they don't. When a patient, be it a stranger or a friend or your own fucking father, is dead on the table in front of you, you damn well don't get to go back and call a do-over.

And yet. His entire final thesis is premised on demonstrating that the last two hundred years of developments in neurosurgical techniques have been, for the most part, a load of unimaginative hooey. When he's in the mood to be both honest and generous with Jim - which he's not, at the moment, but still - he has to admit that he admires Jim's capacity to think outside the box any time, any place, for any reason. It's going to take Jim great places.

Or get him killed. That’s the possibility that really scares McCoy.

So he's pissed, and he's not fool enough to deny that there’s an underlying frisson of tension over Jim roping Christine into whatever game he'd been intending to play that evening. Some scenarios, McCoy is very much tempted to tell Jim, and repeat until the kid gets it through his thick skull, are in fact utterly, absolutely and indisputably un-fucking-winnable.

He's also, however, still completely incapable of not doing whatever he can to help Jim out when it matters, whether it's putting his drunk ass to bed, sitting in on a moronic exercise three different times, or loading him up with one of the most virulent vaccines not kept under tight lock and key and smuggling him in plain sight onto the goddamn flagship of the fleet.

Sometimes he wonders what his life would be like now if he'd just been allowed to stay in that shuttle bathroom like he so fervently wanted. Calmer, he thinks. Fewer headaches. Less danger of vomiting.

Significantly less interesting in a lot of ways.

He drags Jim through the bowels of the Enterprise, dodging Commander Spock and struggling to remember the basic schematics of a Constitution class vessel. By the time he locates the primary medical bay and dumps Jim against an examination table, he's torn between mild concern over the intensity of Jim's reaction to the vaccine, exasperation with how damn _vocal_ Jim is about it, and, a little, satisfaction at the notion that this could constitute a sort of revenge for about a hundred things Jim has done in the past, most recently his stunt with Christine.

McCoy decides to concentrate on the concern. He's a doctor, not a sadist. Still, he's a _human_ doctor, and he can't quite bring himself to muster up a decent bedside manner as he sedates Jim and puts the kid out of his misery. "Unbelievable," he mutters, as Jim drops like a stone.

He goes to change quickly and returns to check in with the CMO and take stock of the situation. He advises Dr. Puri that he has a patient with him, feels guilty about dodging the details with a quick, "It's a long story, sir. I won't let it interfere."

Puri doesn't seem to care, absorbed in going through storage manifests. "Fine, fine. Find something useful to do and go do it, would you? I don't have the heart to call this place operational, state it's in right now. Work to do, m'boy. Talk to Dr. M'Benga - he knows what's what at the moment."

"Yes, sir," McCoy snaps off. He knows M'Benga, has worked with him occasionally since the younger doctor returned from studying on Vulcan, and they have no trouble splitting up the long list of details that need to be either supervised or attended to personally. His frustration grows at an exponential rate as it becomes clear that not only was the medical bay apparently stocked by untrained monkeys, but some of the integrated equipment isn't even working.

It gives him heaps of confidence for how well the rest of this rickety barrel of bolts might be doing.

He checks on Jim. Jim is drooling. Perfect.

He goes to the dispensary to see just what can be done about the paltry amounts of crucial emergency medication kept at each exam table. He finds Christine there, crouched on the floor juggling three different data pads while groping about in the lower cabinet shelves. "Goddamn fucking idiotic - who did this? Drunken morons?" she's muttering under her breath.

"Might want to watch it, Chapel," he says brusquely. "We're not at the hospital anymore. Puri can be a bit of a traditionalist, from what I hear."

She grabs a higher shelf to pull herself up. He doesn't offer her a hand. "Sorry, Doctor McCoy," she says quietly, her voice tight. She looks at him with those placid, intelligent eyes and heat prickles the prick of his neck, his scalp. He scowls, irritated at the reaction she can provoke just by _being_. He wishes, for a second, that she'd been less than the model cadet she had been and gotten assigned to some other ship, away from him, out of his way. "Mind if I ask why Jim is out there sweating like a stuck pig?"

"Yeah, I do mind," he mutters. He grabs the box of vials he needs. "I need heparin for eight beds, if you come across it."

Irritation flares in her eyes, her expression. She contains it. "Yes, sir."

He's never truly been on the receiving end of one of her unspoken "fuck you"s. He doesn’t particularly like it. He turns and strides out, wrestling with frustration. He's not sure if it's with her or with himself.

He's reviewing status reports and listening absently their mission report from the bridge when Jim sits bolt upright, his infernal body chemistry doing its best to turn him into a human marshmallow. Cortisone, he thinks. Of _course_ cortisone would be one of the basic supplies he hasn't been able to find. "Nurse Chapel!" he hollers, as Jim goes nonsensical. "I need 50 cc's of cortisone!"

Her rapid response, the speed with which she gets it to him, reminds him that all else aside he's always liked working with her. Some things, at least, can be relied on.

Jim leads him on a merry chase through the corridors to find Uhura, deep in the main comm relay center. Jim's got a much better memory for the ship layout, doesn't get lost on his way there or, after he finishes babbling about 'Womuwans', straight up to the bridge.

McCoy wonders at first, with an increasingly sinking feeling about his future in Starfleet, whether it was perhaps the best idea after all to give Jim a vaccine known to have a rare but powerful hallucinogenic effect. But then Jim mentions the Kelvin, his birth. McCoy follows the ensuing debate absently. He's not sure he's ever seen Jim be so unflinchingly serious about anything, ever.

It gives him a very bad feeling.

The captain decides. The ship drops out of warp.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"Emergency" is a word that is part of McCoy’s daily existence. "Evasive," while suggestive, does not inherently imply terrible things. He has no real objection to either word.

Strung together, however, they create what is, possibly, McCoy's least favorite phrase in Standard or any other language. Pike utters them before McCoy can even process what he's seeing on the view screen, and that sound is what drives the whole damn fact of what is happening home for him.

The Enterprise strikes debris. He thinks, there've gotta be so many bodies out there. He thinks of his cognitive behavior therapist, of her fucking "happy place" that she wanted him to go for so long until he told her in no uncertain terms to can it with the hokey bullshit and help him figure out something that might actually work. He tries to start running through the carefully constructed thought patterns they'd devised, but what had begun to get tolerable, if never easy, on short transports back east to see his daughter is a little more difficult when people feel it necessary to report whether the goddamn _shields_ are holding.

The shields had better fucking hold, he thinks. As the decimated saucer section of another ship scrapes ominously across some part of the Enterprise, he breaks out in a sweat. His stomach churns. He can't breathe. He gropes, desperately, for a happy place, any place at all. He can't find one.

The Romulan ship blazes, beautiful and terrible, into view. Everyone stares. "Captain, they're locking torpedos," McCoy hears.

They get hit and the ship jerks harder than can be compensated for under the impact. McCoy revises his opinion: "hull breach" is most assuredly his least favorite phrase ever.

He tries hard not to throw up on anybody.

It gets easier, the more minutes that pass without more weapons fire. And then there’s Nero.

There are, point of fact, a handful of things McCoy knows he will never tell Jim.

(For instance: a single damned intimate detail about Christine. Jim kisses and tells like he lives and breathes, and McCoy gets that, he does. He generally doesn’t even _mind_ , per se, though there have been scattered details along the way that he could definitely have done without. Jim is young. Someday he’s going to care about someone, and McCoy is going to be there for him, and he’s pretty damn sure it’s not going to involve him knowing anything he shouldn’t know. He has faith.

In the meantime, besides, Jim already knows a little more about Christine’s hands and mouth than McCoy would prefer. If the idiot can remember it, that is.)

The main thing he’s never going to tell Jim is that when he was four years old, he played with toy spaceships. He _dreamed_ of going into space. Family legend goes that he even wore - and his mother used to swear this up and down and on _her_ mother’s tombstone, though she couldn’t produce a shred of evidence to back it up - Starfleet fucking footie pajamas to bed.

And then the news feeds were full of Kelvin this, Kelvin that. He understood, in the only way a four year old child could, that people had died, and that it was dangerous out there. And when he was older, and learned enough to know _how_ they had died, to understand the myriad possibilities for each particular extinguishing of a life aboard that ship, it all twisted in his head and became a paralyzing terror.

It’s not that he blames the Kelvin incident for his fears, exactly. They were bound to develop for some reason or other; he thinks of his phobia as a weak fault line in his overall makeup, and his childhood was absolutely peppered with learning of an incident here, an incident there. Hell, even if there weren’t occasional shuttle crashes splashed across the news, the Federation had been in a cold war with the Klingons since before he was born. Things happened. He found out about them. He lost control over what the darker corners of his mind did with it all.

So no, he doesn’t blame the Kelvin. But he does remember it, distinctly, absolutely, like very little else he can dredge up from that age. For him it’s an origin point, and something that became an actual secret, closely guarded, once he learned Jim’s history. Jim asked him once what made him so uptight about flying anyway, when McCoy was bitching about his therapist’s most recent crackpot version of psychology. McCoy had merely looked away, professed not to know, damn it, could they talk about something else already? He’d just finished the mandatory Starfleet History course, had only recently put together the Kirk relationship.

Jim never talked about that, himself, which was pretty much all McCoy needed to know to decide that he would never, as long as he lives, intentionally add to Jim's burden over the circumstances of his birth.

The universe at large apparently has no such compunction.

McCoy finds himself focusing on Jim, on the set of his friend's shoulders, on the unfamiliar intensity of his expression as he stares at the Romulan. McCoy remembers, a year ago, Jim drunk on his bed, saying, "she wouldn't fuckin' retire, Bones, why couldn't she just let it _go_?"

He thinks, now, that Winona Kirk is not the only member of the family who has spent years longing for this day to come, should it ever. It’s a flicker, quickly contained, but for a second Jim looks every inch a man out to get revenge for, literally, every single day of his life.

McCoy can’t honestly say that he blames him. Just another of those things that will go forever unspoken.

He leaves the bridge when Pike takes Jim and Spock and Sulu off for whatever harebrained scheme the captain is cooking up. He’s fairly sure, and about this he has actually managed to reach a vaguely calmer level of detachment for which his therapist should be fucking _proud_ , that he’s living out the small remaining portion of his life.

 Be that as it may, he’s still got responsibilities. He finds his way back to the medical bay, only has to stop to check a computer once.

He walks into a war zone. One entire end of the bay is completely decimated, fires still burning as people run to and fro, absolute chaos. McCoy can smell scorched flesh in the air, an unmistakable scent. He goes on automatic pilot - years of training and practice and he _is_ a doctor, damn it, and if they’re all to die in a few minutes or a few hours, fine. Right now, he has patients to treat.

“Nurse Chapel!” he yells, taking quick stock and zeroing in a crewman with a bloody head injury lying on an exam table. He can trust her work, her ability. Whatever else is between them, he has continued to find her presence at his side calming during challenging work. He needs her. He stops at a computer console to log himself in as once again present for patient care. “Get over here! Chapel!”

M’Benga shoves past him, uniform torn, smoke-stained. “Chapel and Puri were getting supplies from central storage when we got hit,” he tosses over his shoulder.

For McCoy, everything stops. All of it. The dwindling fires, the shouts, the panic.

He sees, finally, crystal clear in his mind, the design schematic for a Constitution-class heavy cruiser. He could walk to central storage in his sleep. He knows exactly where it is, and why: it's a low-personnel buffer zone for an area highly vulnerable during direct confrontation.

McCoy braces both hands against the console in front of him and swallows hard against the sick, sour taste of bile that rises from his throat and almost escapes control. His face is too hot; blood pounds in his temples. Voices ring in his head, echoes of the reports shouted across the bridge - direct hit, forward sections, hull breach. Deck six.

Deck goddamn fucking _six_.

He breathes hard, through his nose. He tries not to think about bodies ripped apart by sheer force and fire and shrapnel, about explosive decompression and rupturing lungs and moisture boiling away from the eyes. He tries not to think about just how many interminable seconds a person could survive, conscious but doomed, in the vacuum of space.

He remembers, ridiculously and suddenly, the day Joanna was born. He’d delivered her himself, had held her wrinkly, slippery body in the cup of his hands in the moment before she took her first breath and let loose her first scream. Everything in the world had, right then, narrowed to the sheer importance of a single human life, the uniqueness of it, the miracle. He'd dedicated his own life to the saving of others, but he had never experienced it quite like that before, and never has again.

Until now. Christine is dead.

He’d laughed with her and worked with her and wanted her and, briefly but absolutely, he'd actually had her, in whatever small way. She was smiling up at the sun this morning. She'd woken something inside him that he thought he’d shut down for good after the divorce and hasn’t been quite able to turn off again even though she -

She's gone.

Dear God, he thinks, let her not have known what was happening.

The comm link crackles to life. It's Spock. "Doctor Puri, report."

McCoy sucks in a deep breath through his mouth, stifles the tightness at the back of his throat that threatens his gag reflex. "It's McCoy," he replies. "Doctor Puri was on deck six. He's dead."

A pause. "Then you have just inherited his responsibility as Chief Medical Officer."

It focuses him. It's a relief. "Yeah, tell me something I _don't_ know," he snarls, and cuts the channel to get busy.

She would, he’s fairly certain, approve.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

McCoy’s always hated the very concept of triage. Hated it, pure and simple. If he had his way, his experience of practicing medicine would involve infinite resources with minimal need, and everyone would walk away happy, healthy and whole.

Instead, his current experience involves three dead doctors, four dead nurses, another nurse with a scorched airway and deep burns to more than half of her body, and an influx of crew members with chest wounds, broken bones, intermediate burns, lacerations, and just about every other kind of minor injury he could possibly imagine.

He checks in with the auxiliary medical bay in the engineering section and learns they’re faring far better, mostly minor stuff. He simultaneously orders a third of the personnel to report to him immediately and begins routing every minimal case he can down to the auxiliary bay.

He orders the nurse, a woman in her thirties, a career shifter like him who he’s worked with for two years, to be given pain medication and segregated to the end of the bay until they can give her the treatment she needs. She needs too much; he can’t spare the time. He wishes he didn’t know that she has a husband and a son at home. Nurse Tracy comes by, five minutes later, to tell him she’s died.

He absolutely, without a doubt, hates mass casualties with a vengeance.

He works fast. It allows him not to think of much other than moving from table to table, injury to injury. Once he gets a full view things are - vaguely manageable. His staff is, if utterly over-burdened, also highly competent, and some of tension eases from his shoulders as, everywhere he looks, he sees them already doing exactly what he would want. He’s got surgeons in both operating rooms and gives them discretion to select which patients they take, and dedicates a nurse to keeping them constantly updated on the injuries waiting, the severity.

Within about fifteen minutes, he’s able to step back and breathe a little. The flow of patients has finally stopped, and while they’ve lost three more people everyone else is relatively stable.

Then Jim stumbles in, beat all to hell, with a herd of subdued Vulcans trailing in his wake.

McCoy sort of wonders if this day is ever, ever going to end.

He gives them all a brief once-over and orders them to find seats and wait. "What's happening?" he snaps at Jim, shoving him towards an exam table to scan him quickly.

Jim's face is grimmer than he's ever seen it. "What isn't happening? We were too late, Bones. Vulcan's gone along with everyone on it and Nero's taken off with Pike. It's a complete clusterfuck."

"What the hell do you mean, Vulcan’s _gone_?"

“I mean it’s gone. Nero created a black hole at the center of it and it’s _gone_.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

"I wish." Jim winces as McCoy grabs his hand and looks at it. "Hey, watch it. I'm fine."

"You're not fine, you’re a stubborn ass and you're wounded. But you’ll have to wait - we’re pretty strained at the moment."

"No problem. Go to it. Christine or someone can patch me up when they have a chance."

McCoy clenches his jaw, breathes carefully. It’s not that he’s forgotten; it’s that he hasn’t been letting himself remember. A fresh wave of nausea rolls through him. "You'll have to settle for 'someone',” he says tightly. “Chapel's dead."

Jim says nothing. So many times McCoy has been pushed to wish that Jim would grow the hell up and take things seriously, but he never expected it to come like this, in a steady stare of sympathy, of acknowledgment, in a knowledge of when, for once in his life, to keep his goddamn mouth shut. It makes him suddenly, consumingly furious that this, _this_ is what it takes. Genocide. Dead crew. Christine.

He has to turn away from it, or risk lashing out. "I'll get to you as soon as I can," he snaps.

He goes to check in on the status of the current surgeries underway. Proceeding fine, he’s told, though both rooms could use a resupply of meds. Itching for distraction, he goes to get it himself instead of sending out a nurse.

He walks out of the dispensary, juggling hyposprays, and he looks up and Christine is there.

Her hair has fallen loose of its usual, tidy twist and been whipped into a tangled frenzy around her face, which is a mess of bruising along one side with severe swelling around her eye. She’s breathing hard and staring around, and her uniform is rumpled and spattered liberally with blood. Her knees are dark and crusted over in reddish-brown.

She looks like absolute shit. She looks better than he’s ever seen her look before.

Because she’s alive. So help him God, he latches onto that part of it and clings like a son of a bitch. She’s there, in front of him, _breathing_.

What he says is, stupidly, blankly, “you’re bleeding.”

She barely even looks at him, waves off the concern. "What’s going on?"

Again, encompassing anger that takes him by surprise. He's got the scorched bodies of eight former colleagues stacked in the burnt-out shell of the lab until they can be moved to the morgue, three more crew deaths added to the tally, and god only knows how many others around the ship already waiting be officially classified as dead or missing by the time this is over. He's got patients in every bed and then some, multiple critical cases that are stable but requiring constant monitoring until they can be operated on, a shortage of basic supplies that's fast getting to be a problem, _Vulcans_ , a pounding headache of his own, and now this.

Christine, standing there when he thought she was _dead_ , and she won't even look him in the fucking eye like he matters.

For one immensely, shamefully satisfying moment, he hates her. For this, for the past few weeks, for making him love her in the first place.

"A catastrophe, is what's going on," he snaps at her. “We got ambushed. Our other seven ships have been destroyed, Captain Pike’s been taken hostage by Romulans and Vulcan... the entire planet’s gone. Where the _hell_ have you been?”

Christine shakes her head slowly, blinks at him. “Deck six is re-opened,” she says. She rattles off a succinct injury report, something a shade off about her tone, and it’s with slow-settling horror that he realizes that while he’s been here, thinking he had it bad, thinking there was too much to do with neither time nor resources nor personnel up to the demand, she was trapped, on her own, injured, doing the same damn thing with nothing but her own two hands and absolute grit.

She's a nurse first, she'd once told him. He thinks now that she got that wrong; she's a goddamn force of nature.

His fury shifts, straight onto himself. “I’ve still got a kid down there trying his damnedest to bleed out on me,” she says, her voice beginning to rise, to break. “I couldn’t - I had to leave him. I told him if he dies I’ll beat the shit out of him -” and he moves for her, pulls her with him. It takes her a second to catch on. “Let me go!”

Like there’s a chance in hell of that happening. He calls for M’Benga, sends him out to deal with whatever mess Christine’s been swamped in, and tries, gently, to subdue her attempts to jerk out of his grasp. He hits a breaking point, her behavior scraping his strained nerves. “Nurse Chapel,” he finally orders, “you are hereby relieved from duty until I personally clear you. Until then, you _have_ no job. Now sit your ass down before I sedate you!”

Something, his tone or his words or both, gets through to her.

The first readings from her orbital bones are both a frustration and a relief; he hates the thought of anything hitting her hard enough to fracture bone, but there’s no immediate sign of deeper trauma. He gets it out of her that she fell somehow, that her elbow is also hurt; he grits his teeth at her failure to elaborate on anything. He grits his teeth with the effort of not dropping everything and pulling her close.

Instead he helps her lie back so he can get a full scan of her head. “I thought you were dead,” he tells her quietly. He needs her to know, though he doesn’t understand quite why. He’s spent weeks holding everything in, falling into his same old traps and telling himself he’s respecting her choice, her wishes, but he can’t do it anymore. He needs her to understand what she’s done.

She shrugs it off. She still won’t fucking look at him, but it’s easier to take as he finishes with her eye and elbow and gets a broader view. She’s trembling and her attention isn’t just not on _him_ , it won’t settle on anything. The emotion of her responses is rapidly dwindling, and he’s had enough psychological training to recognize it all for what it is, a reaction she apparently couldn’t allow herself to have until now. He’s surprised, though; he’d thought her steadier than this. Granted, the hospital hasn’t seen any major disasters in the time he’s known her, but she’s been, from the start, the one nurse he would name instantly as most likely to keep her wits about her in a crisis.

The unsteady woman in front of him has clearly, finally, misplaced her wits. He has to ask: “What happened down there?”

She blinks at him. She looks blank. "The hull blew wide open." Her affect is flat, no further trace of the urgency she brought in with her. As she tells him what happened he feels close to being sick all over again, the realization of how close she came - twice - to dying twisting hard in his gut, setting his heart to pounding in his chest. He and his therapist had worked a lot on his fears of what could happen to _him_ in space.

It is becoming increasingly, repeatedly clear to him that they had, apparently, completely overlooked the not-insignificant matter of him having debilitating problems with what could happen to other people. It’s inexplicably worse.

And she just - she dodges the brief attempt he can’t quite contain to connect to her, tells him she’s fine, tells him she’s _calm_. Calm, his ass. He has no choice but to leave her off duty, much as he needs her to help him, to offer her precise, collected expertise - to be _next_ to him, damn it all the hell, so he can keep her safe or die trying.

He sends her off with sharp words and strides into the dispensary. He leans against the wall and just tries to breathe.

Then he goes back to work.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s with some relief that McCoy lets Jim drag him along to the bridge; it allows him to stop staring at the door of the office, to stop having to actively prevent himself from striding in and making Christine, even in her current state, deal with him, with this thing, once and for all.

He’s - he’s not in a good headspace. He knows that. The day has been one long series of emotional highs and lows, and they’re still in the midst of a crisis, and he should not be obsessing over a goddamn _woman_ like some hormonal teenager.

Still. It’s easier to be away from her, to stand by and listen to the command officers try to sort through issues that, frankly, make even less sense to him than his feelings for Christine currently do. It’s easier to listen to Spock, in the calm, rational tones that McCoy bitterly envies at the moment, theorize that they have all been set on different courses that were not meant to be.

He finds something disturbingly - reassuring about the idea that none of this is right. This reality, this sequence of events. The sense he can make of it boils down to: this is not the life I was supposed to live.

It boils down to: maybe some other me actually got shit right.

It’s cathartic - for him at least. He begins to feel, at last, without requiring the constant distraction of treating patients, the functional disconnect he’d worked so hard to develop to cope with his phobia.

These things are happening to me, he thinks calmly. All I can do is deal with it.

Jim, apparently, sees things differently, and in his typical fashion, refuses to let it drop. He want to head for Earth, wants to save the day. He wants to _prevent_. “Every second we waste,” Jim insists, “Nero’s getting closer to his next target!”

McCoy eyes him with concern and wishes, for Jim’s sake, that they were more alike. He’s spent his adult life in a largely reactionary field; while medicine has its preventative functions, he has always focused his efforts more on what to do with problems that have already appeared: treat, repair and, when possible, cure. And failure is always a possibility; much as he detests it, tries to avoid it at almost any cost, he accepts it. He’s trained himself to accept it; not doing so in the past cost him his wife, his home.

Jim, though. Jim would rather rewrite the rules and come out ahead from the start. He’s lived his entire life with the consequences of events he never had the chance to prevent, and he won’t acquiesce so willingly now.

McCoy thinks, as Jim goes nuts and Spock knocks him out, puts him off the ship, that maybe this is for the best. Maybe, later, Jim will be able to absolve himself of guilt for the disaster McCoy feels, increasingly, is inevitably around the corner.

He doesn’t really believe it, but it’s enough of a hope to get him through.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The detachment he’s achieved holds, barely. He has spikes, flares of emotion and frustration and irritation, but mostly he manages to focus clearly, steadily. He returns to the medical bay and does a round to check on everything. In his absence, all the major traumas have been handled and they’re on to treating the minor injuries that had to wait.

He goes to see Christine. She’s calmer, a more recognizable version of herself, if somewhat subdued. He slips; he flares at the touch of her hand to his. She puts him off; he puts it away, not without frustration. He puts her back to work. He answers Spock’s summons and slips again, angry at the endless wait for the next huge catastrophe, at the ease with which the Vulcan manages what is, for him, getting to be harder and harder to maintain.

Jim Kirk, manager of the impossible, rewrites the rules yet again and appears out of nowhere. McCoy, watching Spock try to choke the life out of him, is as stunned as everyone else at first, then just deeply perturbed as it sinks in, what Jim has provoked. He stares hard at Jim as Spock relinquishes command - this time, he thinks, this time Jim has gone too fucking far. “Well, congratulations, Jim,” he snaps. “Now we we’ve got no captain and no goddamn first officer to replace him.”

The gleam is Jim’s eye is, perhaps, the worst of all the extraordinarily bad things this day has coughed up. “Yeah, we do.”

“What?”

Sulu pipes up. “Pike made _him_ first officer.”

Well, isn’t that just the absolute goddamn fucking cat’s meow, McCoy thinks. He has accepted, with what he thinks is fairly impressive level of equanimity, that they’re all just totally screwed no matter what actually winds up happening. They’re out of ideas - they’ve been fast headed for help to hand the responsibility off to others.

 And now they’re in the hands of Jim Kirk, who refuses to accept that “impossible” is, in fact, an honest-to-God _word_ with meaning and consequences.

He sort of resents the spark of hope he feels when Jim says, “Either we’re going down, or they are.” He doesn’t want to hope; it gives him reason to be afraid again. And he is afraid. Even Jim, as he’d learned just that morning, can’t manage the impossible without running out of luck eventually.

He sticks around to strategize, for all the good it does. It very much does _not_ help the reappearing knot in his stomach when he learns that their best chance for success is spilling out of the mouth of a seventeen year old kid.

That's just great, he thinks. Starfleet just couldn't be satisfied with putting dangerous toys in the hands of immature adults. Now they're flat-out dipping into the kiddie pool.

He starts to think they may all just deserve their fate, at this point.

Things move fast. The last thing he hears, before he decides he can’t take it any more and needs to distract himself with patients, is Jim’s voice over the comm, telling Sulu to fire if he has the tactical advantage, Jim’s life be damned. He hears Jim pass the fucking test, once and for all.

McCoy closes his eyes as he steps onto the turbolift. He’s suddenly very sure that Jim’s life _is_ damned, and that Jim Kirk is going to die young after all.

He goes back to the medical bay. Christine is there, stroking the pale forehead of her poor, gutted ensign, talking softly to him. She looks at McCoy, questioning, and he wants like nothing else to pull her aside and tell her everything, to beg her for some frank wisdom about it all.

“Trust me,” he tells her instead, “you don’t want to know.”

He wishes someone would have said the same thing to him, so many hours ago.

And then it’s over, but for picking up the pieces. He takes Pike’s surgery because he’s got the most expertise in brain stem work, because he’s the CMO and it’s a goddamn captain, because he can’t, at the end of it all, face doing anything else.

It gives him a long time to think. When he emerges at last, he’s offered the choice of being relieved and taken straight home. He notes that Christine has already departed, that Jim has insisted on staying, and he decides to stay. He needs more time, he thinks, to clear his head, get himself together.

It’s a long, uneventful week, cruising along on impulse engines alone. He has no patients left, nothing to do. He spends a lot of time on the bridge, a lot of time talking to Jim, and a lot of time alone. He comes to some conclusions.

The main one being, when he lost his father and didn’t put it away quickly enough, well enough, it took his whole life apart. He is prone to extreme emotions at critical points, and he has to stop. He’s done allowing himself to be at the mercy of his own screwed up mind.

He decides, somewhere around the time they pass Jupiter, that he is also quite done being in love with Christine Chapel.

He can’t really afford to do it any other way.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When they reach spacedock and officially relinquish their acting positions aboard the Enterprise, they’re technically on de facto leave until classes resume. He uploads the duty roster for the hospital and sees he’s scheduled, decides not to send a request to have it changed. He still has a day, and he’ll have to face it eventually.

He takes a shuttle to Tennessee.

The divorce had been a sticky affair. Jocelyn’s attorney went after everything, and for eight months McCoy fought at every turn out of sheer anger, the only real thing he could feel at that point. Anger at her, at everything. But fall passed and then winter, and he only ever saw Jocelyn when he went to pick up Joanna. She would hand the baby over almost in relief, dark circles under her eyes, and the longer it went on the more he realized that while he still resented her for giving up on him when he needed her - when he couldn’t say it or even admit it to himself, but when he’d _needed_ her, damn it - there was no satisfaction in seeing her like that, depressed and fading in the too-large house they’d bought with ideas of a larger family.

Her ideas, not his; he really hadn’t been sure he wanted children at all. From the start, they were such different people, working at such cross-purposes. He told his attorney to just fucking give it all to her, already, get this over with. When they met, in his attorney’s office, to sign the last of the agreements, was when he told her he’d decided to enlist. She’d stared up at him, Joanna eighteen months old and asleep in her arms, and nodded shortly. “I’ll sell the house, then. I’d like to move back home, if I’m to do this alone.”

He heard it as the accusation he felt he deserved; he knew damn well what his decision meant for her, for their daughter. He just thought it was better that way. What he _hadn't_ realized, not until months after he’d started at the Academy and met Jim and gotten himself together, a little, was what she was also telling him: that she'd tried, at least, in that small way. That she'd been staying in Atlanta despite herself, for him, for the sake of keeping Joanna close.

She’d never wanted to move there in the first place. But a job had opened, and it was near his father, and she’d done it. Another thing he couldn’t give her credit for until it was far too late.

She’s out with the horses when he arrives in a transport from the shuttle dock. When she sees him she comes to him, gazes at him over the divide of the corral fence. “Leonard,” she says simply.

“Sorry to show up like this,” he says, uncomfortable at the myriad possibilities for her reaction. “I just -”

“It’s all right.” It startles him; she’s been generous with Joanna’s time over the years, but she’s always strongly preferred scheduling in advance. Now she’s just looking at him with concern, not irritation. “I know you were... I know what happened.”

His brow furrows. He can’t imagine why she would be aware of his involvement. “You do?”

“I contacted Starfleet after the news broke and I couldn’t reach you. I managed to chase down a sympathetic admiral.” She scratches idly under the chin of the mare she holding by the lead and looks away from him, her expression tight. “I need to stable her. Go on in. Joanna’s with Dad.”

He goes into the house. They’d been married there, in the back yard, cresting hills in the distance. Joanna is on the floor of the den, playing a hologame with her grandfather. When she looks up and sees him her face lights up. “Daddy!” She gets up and runs to him, launches herself trustingly into his waiting arms, no hesitation. He picks her up and holds her to him, tightly. She’s gotten so much bigger since he last saw her, he thinks. She’s growing up too fast, in his absence. He’d known it would happen; he just hadn’t expected it to bother him so much.

Jacob Fisher climbs slowly to his feet. “Len,” he says easily. “It’s good to see you. I’ll be out on the porch, you need anything.”

McCoy nods briefly in acknowledgment. Joanna clings to him, her head on his shoulder, and he presses his nose to her hair. “You missed two calls,” she says, accusingly.

“I know, baby,” he says. “That’s why I came, to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Did you go to the moon? Mommy said you went up in a spaceship and we looked at the moon with the tel'scope.” She tilts back, presses his cheeks between her soft child’s hands, looks at him with her bright eyes.

“I went further away than the moon,” he tells her. Her eyes widen; she can hardly imagine.

He prefers it that way. If it were up to him she’d stay right here forever, raise horses with her mother, never step foot off the planet. But even that can’t keep her safe, not for sure. He knows that now. There are no guarantees.

He buries the thought that in another reality, she may not even exist. That some other him hadn’t wanted her or any other child, either, and had gotten his damned way.

Jocelyn clears her throat from the doorway. “How long can you stay?”

He looks at her over Joanna’s shoulder. “I can’t. I thought we’d just have lunch, if you don’t mind. I have to get back before tomorrow.”

She nods. They make sandwiches side by side like they used to, assembling them together at the kitchen island. He perches Joanna on the counter, next to him, within reach. She kicks her feet against the wood paneling and he listens to the meandering stories she babbles out, an entire week of her life tripping off her tongue in fits and starts. To her, he knows, it must be an eternity. She usually only has to try to cover a few days at a time. She sits in his lap while he eats and he and Jocelyn talk about nothing important at all.

Later Jocelyn walks with him to the road to wait for his transport back. “I would listen, you know,” she says, “if you wanted to tell me what’s wrong.”

He just shakes his head. “It’s nothing you haven’t heard before,” he says. “Variations on a damned theme. I just needed to see her.”

Jocelyn nods. “I’m glad you came. I didn’t know what to tell her at first when you didn’t call on schedule, until I found out you were alive. She was - we were scared.”

“Jo...”

She stares off down the road. “She’s not going to understand, you know, once you’re assigned. Not right away.”

He sighs. “I’ll do what I can to get her ready for it.”

“Thank you. Leonard... I figured out how to tell her you’d call as soon as you could. Please don’t make me figure out how to tell her you never will.”

He tries for a light smile, but those became impossible with this woman years ago. “Gone are the days of wishing I’d drop dead, huh?”

She looks down at the ground and laughs weakly, kicks at the dirt. “Yeah, I think they are.” The transport pulls up and she looks up at last, stepping in to hug him gingerly. On a whim he kisses her mouth, firmly, successive kisses seeking something more than he’s capable of putting a name to and also more she’s willing to give. She lets him, her mouth soft, but she doesn’t respond. She finally pats her hands against his chest and steps back. “Take care of yourself,” she says quietly.

He nods briefly. He feels nothing in the shuttle to San Francisco, no fear. He’s not entirely sure he feels anything at all, other than a vague regret that he couldn’t stay longer with Joanna, that he’s missing so many of the days of her unconditional adoration. He worries that she’s going to resent him someday, going to hate him for all the things he’ll never do and never be there for.

He’s going to lose her, too, eventually.

Maybe not such a _vague_ regret, after all. He can’t look too closely at it. Just live with it, and with a growing dread of going back to work.

He gets back late and goes straight to his room. He doesn’t let himself look down the hall as he lets himself in.

Jim is waiting for him. “What the hell are you doing in here?” McCoy snaps. He’s tired, wants to go to sleep. He doesn’t have the energy to deal with more of the tumult of emotions Jim has been going through for the past week. Jim has put on a cheery face through it all, joking easily about his own infallible heroics, about whether it was reasonable to expect a parade when they got back, about how awesome they all were - him especially.

McCoy noticed, though, that he wouldn’t mention specifics. Vulcan, Nero, Pike - the names and details never seemed to figure in, the losses, the consequences. McCoy, neck deep in the task of putting his own feelings in order before they got back to Earth and he had to face reality, wasn’t particularly inclined to press him on the issue. The last day of the journey Jim had come to find McCoy, had poked restlessly through the supply cabinets nobody had bothered to try putting back in order. Jim hadn’t said much of anything at all, and had left eventually with a cheerful wave and a quick comment about getting ready to be adored, but also a strange tension in his shoulders.

Now he’s sitting on the end of McCoy’s bed, studying. “Hiding,” Jim says frankly. “Mind?”

“Yeah, actually,” McCoy mutters. “Come on, Jim, it’s late. Weren’t you the one itching to get back and hear the raucous applause?”

Jim frowns. “More like the raucous chiming of the comm link. Howard won’t let me turn the fucking terminal off in case his girlfriend calls.”

“Yeah, so? Since when have you ever hesitated to get your fucking ego stroked by as many people as possible?”

Jim won’t rise to the bait; he slumps and rubs his eyes. “My mom knows I’m back and I can’t order Uhura to run interference anymore,” he says tersely. “Whatever. It’s not a big deal. Did you see Joanna? How is she?”

“Sprouting up like a weed,” McCoy says wearily. “Reading a lot.”

“At - she’s four now?”

“Yeah, few months ago.” McCoy shrugs out of his jacket and sits heavily in his desk chair. “Jocelyn says she just took to it like a duck to water. She’s a smart kid.”

“She’s yours.” McCoy acknowledges the compliment with a twitch of his eyebrows. “I’ll clear out. It’s late enough that she’s probably given up.” Jim sighs. “Or Howard’ll let me turn the damn thing off at last. Breakfast tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

In the morning he meets Jim in the cafeteria. Jim is faking it again, flashing bright smiles and responding to every greeting that people call to him. He picks idly at his food, though. “You wanna tell me what the hell is wrong, already?” McCoy snaps, exasperated.

Jim shrugs. “There was this girl,” he says, picking at his food. “Gaila. She’s on the lists.”

McCoy stares at him. “Friend of yours?”

Jim just stares out over other tables. “Could have been. I was kind of an asshole to her. It just - it all sort of sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, Jim,” McCoy says, at a loss for anything else. “It all sort of does.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The hospital is busy, and he feels guilty for the relief that the heavy workload provides; they’ve lost the majority of their senior interns. In his absence most of the patients he’d been working with have gone on their way, and he spends a few minutes reviewing the charts of the injured crew from the Enterprise, then throws himself into getting familiar with a new caseload.

At three o’clock, Christine shows up.

She slips into the nurses’ station and signs in for duty without a word to him. He stares at the chart in front of him and clenches his jaw, breathes deep. He’s gone over and over this in his head, this past week; he’s prepared. He steels himself and looks at her.

He notes - clinical observation, he tells himself - that someone did a good job, putting her back in order. Her eye is completely healed, without a hint of residual swelling or bruising. “Chapel,” he makes himself say. His voice comes out as steady as he told himself it would be, the times he imagined seeing her again. “You’re looking better.”

She gives him scarce moments of attention. That’s fine, he thinks. That’s good. So what if he can’t figure out what the hell he _did_ with her, to her, that was so wrong, to make her expression so withdrawn and her posture so tense; the end result is that she’s making everything all the more easy. “I take it your trip back was a safe one?” she asks politely, distracted.

Right, the safest week ever, limping slowly in a spaceship with heavy amounts of structural damage. He still can’t quite believe he subjected himself to it. “Blissfully.” He stares at her, at the curve of her exposed neck, at her freshly unmarred profile. She’s perfectly put together, as if nothing ever happened. She looks up at him and he frowns, kicking himself. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he says, irritated at his own slip. “I’m scheduled for surgery soon.”

McCoy spends the rest of his shift operating, a stream of non-urgent procedures that have been piling up due to the - the personnel shortage. He leaves at the end of his shift and goes to get in some lab time to work on his thesis. His schedule for completing the damn thing was already tight, and now he’s lost more than a week.

When he gets back to his dorm, Christine is on the floor outside his room, curled tightly in on herself. Worry seizes him and he tries, for a moment, to resist it, tries to recover his resolve. But he can’t - _won’t_ \- imagine any good reason for her to be coming to him like this, and he may be done moping over her but he’s damned if he can bring himself to be a complete unfeeling bastard, even towards her. She was his friend first and, maybe, if he can go about it right and stick to his guns, she can be his friend again.

Maybe he doesn’t have to lose it all, this time.

She doesn’t look up as he approaches and he has to crouch down, touch her shoulder. “All right, there?”

She gives a weak attempt at a smile. “Sure. I was just - I needed to talk to you, so I thought I’d wait.”

Of course, he thinks with mild bitterness, assured that she’s not hurt or in the midst of some other crisis, _now_ she wants to talk. He’s tempted to tell her no, to shoo her off to her own room. He can’t quite bring himself to do it. “Wait’s over, then,” he agrees reluctantly. “Come on in.”

She sits at his desk, as annoyingly tightly contained as ever in his presence. He waits, curious, until she says, “Just tell me something - did Jim Kirk really save the fucking planet? Or did I dream that up and somehow start a mass hallucination?”

Had he been able to figure out what to expect from her, it wouldn’t have been anything like that. It’s a relief, her levity, even though her voice cracks and wavers in the middle of it. He overlooks that and lets himself respond in kind, gives her a glossed over answer that plays to Jim’s reputation and - to be brutally fair - routine antics.

She sees right through it. “Is he all right?”

He looks at her. She’s done that before, cut down to the quick with an astute, instinctual understanding of things beneath Jim’s surface, of McCoy’s friendship with him. It surprised him every time, and it surprises him again. It reminds him of too many reasons she dug under his skin in the first place, but strangely, it doesn’t hurt like he expects it to. “He will be, yes,” he admits slowly. He holds her gaze. “He’s been coming down hard the past few days, is all. I don’t think he’s quite ready to deal with the underlying issue.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Which is?”

“He’s dodging transmissions from his mother left and right,” McCoy says dryly, then sighs. Jim’s problems are, frankly, a little more than he can deal with wading through at the moment. “I don’t want to talk about Jim anymore. How are you doing?”

She bites her lip. “Fine. It was touch and go for awhile - crotch fungus was starting to seem preferable to assignment in the fleet.” He feels his mouth quirk automatically. She drops her gaze to her hands. “I’m coping,” she says softly. “I just - I didn’t want to be alone anymore, not right now. Times like these are when it sucks to be a loner, you know?”

He feels, abruptly, like a complete asshole, like he’s as self-absorbed as he’s ever accused Jim of being. It comes together for him in a fast, sickening flash, what she’s putting out there right in front of him despite her best efforts to keep it in. Her sad eyes, the brittle set of her posture. The long lists of the dead. The knowledge, pushed aside by his obsessing over his own problems, that she went through a hell of her own, and that while he clung to the refuge offered by a week’s journey back, she came back and dealt with it.

Alone. “Yeah,” he says softly, watching her carefully. “Your roommate...?”

Her shoulders flinch back, just a little. “Mayflower,” she tells him.

“I’m sorry.” There’s nothing else to say, just as there was nothing else he could offer Jim that morning. She glances at him and nods briefly. “Me, too,” she says.

“Come here,” he says, on a whim, holding out his hand. She’s there, in front of him, hurting, and she - he has to do this, he knows. He has to bring himself to do this right, to be to her whatever she’ll accept. If he doesn’t, none of it - _none_ of it - will have been worth a goddamn thing other than failure and regret.

In the wake of that realization, her resistance grates on his nerves. He pulls her into a hug and carefully suppresses any reaction to her body tucked against his, her arms around him. He tells her his access code and smells her hair. “You can come here any time you want, all right?” he tells her quietly.

Her arms tighten around him. It’s an inconsequential pressure, but it makes him feel like he can’t breathe. He rubs circles into the taut muscles in her back, absently, until she goes slightly slack. “Lie down and get some rest,” he suggests.

He can feel her gaze on him as he reviews months of lab notes, is acutely aware of when her breath evens out and she sleeps. He works until he’s too tired to make sense of the words and numbers in front of his eyes, then changes quickly in his bathroom and stands at the end of his bed, looking down at her.

She is, he thinks, just another variable in the increasingly accidental life he seems to be living. Maybe in Nero’s reality he never knew her. Maybe he never loved her. A week ago, a day, he’d have had an easy time of saying that it would have been better like that, that he would have been better off. He might have had an easy time convincing himself that he even believed it.

But he can’t, now, with her right in front of him again. He does love her; he suspects, fully and finally, that he always will. And he has a choice to make: he can fall into the same trap that ensnared him with Jocelyn, the cycle of anger and blame over her failure to be what he _wanted_ her to be that cost them years before finally, apparently, getting to something that felt, yesterday, like mild affection.

Or he can just be there for her, and take whatever he can get, and live without the rest. It will be something, and possibly something more than any version of him, in any time or place, was ever fortunate enough to have.

He decides. He lies down next to Christine and counts her breaths, in and out, until they lull him to sleep. During the night he’s tugged awake and she’s closer, her arm over him. He draws her close and presses his face to the crown of her head, rubs her back as she mumbles something distressed in her sleep. He sleeps again, deeper this time, and he never stirs whenever it is that she leaves.

He’s made the choice, he reminds himself when he feels irritated that she just left. It’d be a mistake to fool himself into thinking it will be an easy one. Late in the morning she slips into the seat next to him in their Comparative Xenobiology course. “Thank you,” she says quietly instead of a greeting. She doesn’t look at him. He tears his gaze away and stares at the front of the room. “No problem,” he mutters.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The thing about surviving against insurmountable odds, he begins to understand, is that even if you’re not sure what to make of the life you’ve managed to hang onto, it does go on. He’s seen it in patients before, seen them make miraculous recoveries and come through it different. Some have a new thirst for life and go after it with zeal.

Some seem lost, like they can’t figure out what, exactly, they’re supposed to do with the days and years they’d already come to terms with no longer expecting to have.

McCoy is not particularly pleased to have to admit that he’s landed flat on his face in the latter group. He goes to class; he goes to work; he spends time with Jim. Jim, who has finally found his feet in the former category, like he _needed_ more zeal. McCoy thinks it has something to do with talking to his mother, at last; Jim just shrugged when he admitted it, said “she cried. Sort of a lot,” and changed the subject but seemed lighter, somehow.

Now he seems determined to try and drag McCoy over to his side of things. He pops up more than ever, drags McCoy out as frequently as possible. “You are,” he tells McCoy one night, when they’re having drinks, “the stupidest son of a bitch I’ve ever known. Including myself, by the way, which is really pretty impressive when you think about it.”

McCoy glares at him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he grouses.

“Yeah, Bones, I think you do.” And that’s all Jim says about it, then.

McCoy is annoyed. By that, by a lot of things. By the passing of every day in which everything is the same, the familiar patterns of his life suddenly stifling, suffocating. He goes through the motions and he wonders what the point of it is, any of it, all of it. It’s a familiar feeling. In the months after he and Jocelyn had separated he had drifted, had done most things because he was _supposed_ to, because they were the only things left that made sense. He clung to anger because it was the only thing left that made him feel alive.

Christ, half the time he’d only bothered with Joanna because ‘father’ was just another of the roles he knew he was expected to play to have any claim to being a decent person, still. It had been too hard, most of the time, to face the fact that the strange little creature he’d helped create, had struggled with even truly wanting, had been from the moment she was born weaseling under his skin and mattering, just by existing. Shortly before her first birthday she’d opened her mouth and said “da-da” for the first time, clearly, distinctly, accompanying it with a loose fist to his nose.

He’d returned her to Jocelyn that night and drunk himself into a stupor, sick with the knowledge he could no longer avoid that she was the most important accomplishment in his life thus far, and he’d already screwed it up beyond repair.

McCoy told himself, months later when he decided to enlist, that it would be better for her. He thought he’d rather fail her by not being there than in all the other ways he was sure he would, otherwise.

Christine steadies right in front of him, gets her bearings again. He tries not to resent her for her apparent ability to do it on her own. He reminds himself that he cares about her, and like he’s finally glad that Jocelyn took control back into her own hands and moved home and put her life back together, healthily, he wants to be glad that Christine has figured out some way to deal with everything that happened, with the daily consequences they still have to face.

He wants to be glad that her spark is coming back, slowly but surely. Instead it just makes him crabby, for the most part. The saving grace of it is that she’s used to some version of an irritable demeanor from him, doesn’t seem to think much of it, doesn’t take it personally. The same strength that makes her not need him lets her, at least, not be completely offended by what he can’t control.

He comes home from the labs one night and she’s asleep on his bed, and, tired, he can’t help but toy with the idea that she needed him for something after all, that she came to him, that she waited for him. He can’t help thinking that he likes getting back to find her there, like she belongs, an old thought that rises unbidden but compelling. He sits next to her on the bed and lets himself palm her cheek, skim his thumb across the soft indentation under her lower lip. She murmurs in her sleep and turns her face into his touch like a plant seeking the sun. The simple, unconscious movement snaps something inside him. He has to jerk off in the shower before he trusts himself to lie down next to her and sleep.

 She’s gone again, when he wakes. He tells himself, angrily, to get fucking used to it already. This is the choice he made. This is the result.

A month after they get back, Jim strides into the hospital and hunts him down in the imaging rooms, where he’s reviewing a sequence of brain scans. “How awesome am I?” Jim asks, shutting the door behind himself and leaning against it.

McCoy glances at him, notes the trademark smirk and the too-bright gleam in his eyes. “About as awesome as head lice or any other nuisance,” he snaps, mildly, returning his attention to the scans. “Go away. I’m busy.”

“You’re not too busy for this, Bones. You should maybe sit down.”

“Damn it, Jim, spit it out. I really am busy.”

“They’re promoting me straight out to captain and giving me the Enterprise.”

McCoy stares at him, searches for signs of deception. “You’re full of it,” he says flatly. “Even Starfleet’s not stupid enough to put _you_ in charge on _purpose_.”

“No, no, they are actually exactly that stupid.” A smug smile tugs at Jim’s mouth. “Pike just called to tell me himself. It’ll be announced at commencement. Repairs are supposed to be complete by the end of summer, and then I get her. Five year mission.”

He stares even harder, realizes this is for real. Jim is not fucking with him. A flood of emotions hits him - a lot of annoyance and exasperation at Starfleet for making a call this patently ridiculous given Jim’s history and attitude towards life in general, a lot of worry about all the things that could happen out there, if - _when_ \- Jim gets too reckless.

Mostly, he figures out after a few long, silent seconds, he’s so goddamn proud of Jim he could spit. “Congratulations, kid,” he finally says. “I trust you’ll try to keep her out of spacedock and in one piece a little longer this time?”

Jim grins. “Hey, I was handed damaged goods in the first place,” he says in good humor. His face goes slowly serious. “Bones. You’re with me, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“CMO. Just say yes, you know it’s always easier that way.”

McCoy blinks, shocked. “For Christ’s sake, Jim, have you finally lost it completely? You can’t fucking give me a prime position in the fleet just because we’re friends, damn it, that’s not how -”

“Hey,” Jim snaps. “Fuck you. I just got a privileged peek at your record, _Doctor_ , and besides the fact that you far outclass anyone else available for assignment, I’ve seen you in action out there. I’m handing this to you because you’re good and because you fucking deserve it, whether you believe that or not.” He looks away and breathes deep, is quieter when he speaks again. “Say yes, Bones. I’m gonna do this right, and I want you there.”

McCoy thinks back over the time he’s known Jim, of all the things Jim has asked him, wheedling and insistent, to do. Not a damn one of them seems important anymore, not compared to this. “All right,” he hears himself say. “Don’t think I’m not going to kick your ass into line when you need it, though.”

Jim’s shoulders drop and he smiles. “Counting on it.” He tosses a data pad across the room and McCoy catches it. “Records of all medical personnel available - flagship gets to cherry pick. Put together your requests by the end of week and I’ll submit them for approval. I gotta go.”

He pops his head back into the room a second after leaving. “Bones... thanks. For everything.”

The official offer of the position comes in that night; McCoy sends his acceptance immediately. He toys with the personnel records for days, narrows them down to his ideal team. A surgical staff with broad qualifications, a lab group he thinks could probably handle any problem thrown at them, a handful of general practitioners, a solid set of nurses.

He comes back to Christine’s record, again and again, unable to make a decision. He knows, rationally, that he’d be damn lucky to have her in his medical bay, that any doctor would. Hell, he knew before he knew _her_ that she’s good at her job, that she can be counted on do whatever she can for a patient, above all else. Even now he can appreciate it, the times they work together, how important her skills are to getting the job done and done well.

He’s not so sure, however, that any of that matters enough, not while he’s staring down the barrel of a five-year-long gun.

The night before the roster is due back in Jim’s hand, she slips into his room in the evening with an apologetic smile and a tightness around her eyes. She sits cross-legged on his bed and twists her hands in her lap as she talks of this and that. “Calloway’s being an ass as usual,” she mentions. “He got in my face this morning about a drip I started on one of his post-ops.”

McCoy glances up from the data pad where he’s got her record pulled up, again, and watches her closely. “What happened?”

She picks at his comforter. “I grabbed a weaker solution than he’d ordered, total accident. He thought I was questioning his orders again and reamed me out.” 

“Oh, Christ... what’d you do?”

“Nothing, don’t worry. He had the decency to do it in private, at least. I told him I was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again. I did make a mistake. Just - fucking asshole about everything under the sun, you know? I want to punch him even when he’s right.”

But you didn’t, he thinks, and frowns. Nurse, then officer, then concerned with the petty details. As wary as it makes him, he can’t really ask for much more, and he knows he owes her the same. She looks up and meets his eyes and something flashes across her face, something he can’t pin down. “I - I should get going,” she says suddenly. “I’m distracting you, I’ll - good night.”

“Night,” he says quietly. He watches her leave quickly and glances back down at the pad in his hand. He puts her on the list, third in the nursing hierarchy, just behind a man and woman with several years more experience than she has.

Head nurse in five years, she’d said the day he met her, in that steady, brassy way of hers. He’s pretty sure she’ll be able to do in less time than that. And he wants to see that happen, emotion be damned. He’ll get through it, somehow, and if he can’t have her he’ll at least have a damn good nurse on his staff.

When he hands the final roster over, Jim scrolls through it quickly before looking up at him, something speculative in his gaze. “Good team, you think?” he asks.

“Yeah,” McCoy tells him. “The best I could ask for.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Weeks begin to pass in an appealingly stressful rush to get everything done. He’s buried in work at every turn without time to think, moving blearily from class to the hospital to the labs, each day barely distinguishable from the last until Jim shows up on a Friday while he’s talking to Joanna over the comm link. Jim waits, silent but with an impatiently tapping foot, until McCoy tells Joanna good night and shuts down the transmission. “ _What_?” McCoy snaps.

“Time for a break. C’mon, we’re going out.”

He doesn’t bother arguing. He does need a break, and Jim’s tone doesn’t suggest flexibility, anyway. “Yeah, yeah, okay, whatever,” he grumbles, but tugs on his jacket and follows Jim out into the hall.

Jim turns the wrong damn way. “Just gotta grab Christine,” he says cheerfully. It takes McCoy a blank moment to make sense of that casual, _horrifying_ comment, then he strides after Jim. “Damn it, Jim, don’t you fucking _dare_ -”

Too late: Jim raps insistently on Christine’s door. McCoy realizes he’s stuck, roped in by a master, and gives up with a sigh, leans wearily against the wall. If he has any luck at all, he thinks, she’s won’t be there, she won’t -

She opens the door and stares at them both. She has her hair down; he thinks briefly that he’s always liked it that way and then clenches his jaw, shrugs at her as she and Jim negotiate the terms of her coming along. McCoy sort of wants to kill Jim, for a second, for the easiness he has in talking to her, in making her smile indulgently.

He definitely wants to kill Jim, painfully and a _lot_ , as the night wears on. Jim is - Jim is in top form, sitting next to Christine and flirting and leaning in to talk close and brushing against her and making his goddamn patented Jim Kirk eyes of “yeah, I know, how can you _help_ but want this?” suggestiveness at her. He’s making her laugh. He’s making her come alive. He’s doing everything McCoy hasn’t been able to do since she shut him out.

And the thing of it is, McCoy knows exactly what Jim is doing. He _knows_. Jim may be a lot of things, many of them deserving of a fair amount of irritation or flat-out criticism, but he’s not a sadistic bastard and he’s not a disloyal friend. McCoy does not look at his antics and see Jim going after Christine, right in front of him.

He just sees Jim turning his life into one of his damned games, nothing more than another challenge for him to poke and nudge and prod until all pieces fall into place right where he wants them - never mind that the pieces don’t fucking fit, Jim Kirk will _make_ them fit.

The problem, McCoy thinks, is that his own edges are rough and well-defined, chiseled out by too many years, too many disappointments, and Christine’s are made of all the steely strength that made him admire her in the first place. They don’t fit; they’re not going to. He could, maybe, try to twist himself to her, and he stares angrily out into the crowd at the bar and thinks he’s even tried to, in all his clumsy, unsuccessful efforts to figure out a way to push himself back into some role she finds acceptable, doesn’t shy away from.

 But they’re never going to be exactly matched. Not when they want different things. This, this right here, is one perfectly goddamn unwinnable scenario.

He tries to ignore them, focuses on clamping down on the anger that Jim is, most definitely, going to get an explosive dose of as soon as they’re alone. Or, to hell with being alone, as soon as they’re anywhere where Christine is _not_. He can tell he’s pissing her off enough as it is; her jaw is firming more and more with irritation, and she slights him when she pours drinks. She pays attention to Jim. “Time to spill,” she says teasingly. “Just how is life as a hero?”

Jim slips into the role expertly. “Pretty damn awesome, gotta admit. The levels of fawning alone - it’s mind-blowing. And there was this one chick last week, _man_ , the things she said while I was -”

Christine interrupts, laughing. “Hold it. That’s quite enough, I get the picture.”

“I doubt it,” Jim says. He puts his arm around her and McCoy grinds his teeth together, notes how she doesn’t object. “Somehow, Christine, I don’t think your imagination is anywhere _near_ filthy enough.”

McCoy slaps his shot glass down on the table, fed up. “Jim, don’t be an asshole,” he snaps.

Perfect innocence in Jim’s eyes as he protests, annoyance on Christine’s face as she defends him, keeps teasing. McCoy wonders, harshly, why the hell he’s even sitting there, angering her to the point that she’s actually lashing out at him, clearly getting closer and closer to finally telling him to fuck himself once and for all.

 Because, he tells himself, bitterly and sarcastically, staring at Jim touching her neck, whispering into her ear, it worked so damn well with Jocelyn, after all.

Christine meets his eyes for a second and there. He sees it, perfect fury. He waits for it, lifts the drink she pours with a trembling hand. “Jim,” she grinds out, “you are a very handsome guy, and generally a delight to be around, and you’re even entitled to some pretty major gratitude for the unbelievable _shit_ you somehow pulled off. But let me tell you something - the only person at this table I have any desire to fuck is _him_ , so _lay_ _off_.”

Hell, he can hardly be blamed for spilling perfectly good whiskey all over the table.

Jim gets up with an immensely self-satisfied expression on his face and leaves them alone, and McCoy fixes his attention on wiping up the green mess he’s made. Epiphanies, he thinks in a mild, detached sort of way, are just goddamn shocking sons of bitches.

“Well?” she presses, while he’s trying to process the fact that she wants him, the concept that he’s been so completely, entirely _wrong_ about her. “Are you going to say anything?”

He wants too many things, too suddenly, too unexpectedly to make much sense of. He wants to know what he ever did to deserve this. He wants to believe there’s some way for this to end that doesn’t involve the conclusion that he’s just a damn fool.

He wants, in a way that scares and shames him, more than a little, to haul her up and put her against the table and have her, again, at last, right there.

He looks at her, lets anger take over and guide him. “Yeah. What the hell is your problem? Are you incapable of contemplating relationships except through the bottom of a glass?”

“I’m no good at them,” she tells him simply, frowning. “Obviously.”

No good at them. Christ, he thinks, but when is his life going to stop boiling down to people being no _good_ at relationships. “You’re aware that I’m no longer married,” he says tightly. “According my my ex’s many and detailed diatribes on the subject, neither am I.”

She purses her lips at that. “And,” she adds, “I really hate that you’ve seen me fall apart.”

No, he wants to say to her. No. He’s seen her wound tighter than a ball of string, never loosening no matter what the universe or Jim fucking Kirk do to bat her around, never allowing herself to unravel and expose herself. That’s the entire problem, apparently, that right there, and he hates that he hasn’t seen it before. The worst he’s ever seen her do is - “Have I? I don’t recall that. I recall you doing your damn job under impossible circumstances, just like you’re supposed to.”

“You know what I mean,” she mutters, miserably. She doesn’t elaborate.

“No, goddamn it,” he snaps, sick of it all, sick at the thought that months of his life, months of turmoil, all come down to her running scared and him not seeing through it. “I really don’t.” He grabs his jacket and slides out of the booth. “Hell with it. I have better things to do then deal with this shit.”

It’s raining outside, a light spring rain that mists over everything, soaking it, without pressure. Christine follows him and he wishes she would go away, leave him to think, but he doesn’t say anything to her. At the station he stares at the approaching tram. “If I had any kind of patience for being ignored by a woman except when she’s in the goddamn _mood_ to deal with me on adult terms, I’d still be married.” It’s an unfair reduction of the mess of his marriage, he knows that now, but it was the truth as he saw it for so long and it rears up, seizes him again, the old, bitter need to blame Jocelyn for what went wrong.

On the tram he stares at her for a long time. She bites her nail, won’t look at him. Her subdued manner helps something in him cool slightly. At last she says, “you’re the only man I’ve ever even had to see again, after.”

He remembers being unable, for the life of him, to decide whether he thought she’d even been with anyone, at all, the rarity of not being able to get a sense for it, especially at her age. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he mutters. “You talk a real good game sometimes, Christine, but you push people away. Every time it comes to mattering, you’re at arm’s length. It’s a lousy way to live.”

And doesn’t he know it. He feels indescribably sad when she just looks at him evenly. “It gets me through.”

“It won’t, always.” It’ll tear you apart, he almost adds. It’ll tear you down unless you’re lucky enough to meet some crazy kid who won’t take no for an answer.

He wishes like never before that he could be more like Jim sometimes. But he’s not. He never will be. He growls at the world but he always gives in, sooner or later.

By the time they reach the dorm he still just wants to get away from her, less from anger than from a need to be done and through the moment she pushes him away, again, because she doesn’t know how to do anything else. “I want you and you damn well know it. I’d like nothing more than to haul you in here and spend the rest of the night showing you how much,” he says in the door of his room, because he needs her to understand the extent of what she’s doing, needs to be able to tell himself, if nothing else, that it will never again come down to him not putting words to what’s really going on. “But I’ll want that tomorrow and the next day, too, and I’ve got exactly zero interest in doing your cockamamie little song and dance again.” She doesn’t say anything and the disappointment is mercifully mild, expected, nothing new here. “Good night, Christine,” he tells her.

He feels numb as he turns on a lamp and strips off his jacket, hangs it carefully to dry. He stands still for a minute and breathes slowly. He wonders, for the first time since he made the decision, whether it was a mistake to request her for assignment to the Enterprise.

He just can’t see how the hell he’s going to be able to do it.

He’s just starting to undress when the door slides open and she’s there, backlit from the hall and shadowy, ill-defined. “Neither do I,” she says. Her voice wavers. “So we’ll try it differently this time.”

He drops his sweater. He resists, automatically, the surge of hope. “Differently,” he says flatly.

Christine takes a deep breath. She steps in enough to let the door close; as the emphasis of light shifts, he can see her face more clearly. She’s scared. “Yes. Tomorrow, if you want me - _when_ you want me. I’ll be here.”

 Christine Chapel and her goddamn ability to make the entire universe grind to a halt. He closes his eyes and breathes and wants and needs to know. “Come here.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t look, until the lapels of her jacket brush his chest. He touches her face, openly and without a medical excuse, for the first time since - in too long. Too damn long. Her skin is still wet from the rain. “And the next day?”

She holds his gaze. “And the next,” she says. She jokes weakly about dying and his lungs burn at the possibility, at the memory. He doesn’t want a promise like that, doesn’t want the taint of fear on this just when it’s sinking in that she’s - that she’s here, and willing to make promises of any sort. “Until we’re assigned, at least,” she modifies. “Might go different places.”

He tells her then, about the Enterprise, about wanting her there. He kisses her and presses down her wild hair, tastes the lingering sweetness of Aldebaran whiskey on her tongue. He listens to her voice go steady and unafraid at last. “I want it,” she tells him.

Something goes still inside him that’s been churning since she ran away from him, outside the hospital.

McCoy undresses her slowly, every moment she doesn’t resist a gift, every cooperative movement she makes. He keeps an eye on her, sitting and waiting silently, as he takes off his clothes and crawls to her, takes her head in his hands and kisses her how he wants, deep and hard. Her hands, when they touch him, are gentle and coaxing, skilled, assured, and her mouth, when it follows, is wickedly delicate in its attentions. He stares down at her, combs her damp hair away from her face with his fingers, lets the pressure build until it’s almost too late.

She stares up at him, disappointed, when he pushes her away. It twists inside him, the shine of desire in her eyes, the _wanting_. “Easy, honey,” he says, lured by it, by the honesty he sees. “You’ll get it - when and where I decide.”

He’s not proud of it, the need he can’t quite keep reined in to bend her to his will, just a little. He’s uncomfortable, even, with holding her down, using his strength against her. He's always been a man of fairly straightforward tastes, preferring strong women and mutual enjoyment to power games. He's just never seen the appeal. He’s used to liking women to laugh, and gasp, and move freely - not struggle.

Christine has stripped him down to baser desires once before already, and it was good, that was _good_ , it was _words_. He's used to being harsh in his words and gentler in his actions - it's how he gets through life, every day. This, though, pinning her wrists and manipulating her, ordering her and waiting, breathlessly, to see if she obeys - he doesn't like the lingering emotions it's rooted in, how it has too much to do with too many weeks of frustration and disappointment, that she would just do things differently, want him, be there for him, love him in return. It’s too bound up in the knowledge, which he’s keeping carefully pushed to the back of his mind, that she’s promised her presence, and her desire, but nothing else.

It boils down, if he looks too closely, to knowing he can’t and never could make her feel anything emotionally she doesn’t choose to feel, but he can damn sure make her body react the way he wants.

He tries not to look too closely, even as he cautiously explores the boundaries of the unfamiliar urge. He holds her arms still and sucks hard at her breast, wrings moans from her. She moves helplessly under his hands and his mouth; she doesn’t hesitate to follow his rough command to part her legs and give him access. It rushes through him, each small victory she cedes, willingly, and the slickness his fingers encounter is a balm to his ego.

She wants him, he thinks in a blaze of satisfaction as he slides fingers into her and touches her firmly. She’s with him all the way. He makes her writhe, and breathe hard, and her gasped “Please,” is the last soothing stroke he needs. “Hold your horses, honey,” he says, teasing in his aggravation, feeling the unsettling aggressiveness slip, ease a little. He licks her neck, finds a spot that makes her arch her head back and moan. He feels lighter with every reaction he can get from her. “I’ll get you there. Bratty little impatient vixen _kid_ -”

Christine huffs out a breath and she twists a hand free and he lets her because this, her holding him because she wants to and she can, her joking with him and making him laugh, this is how it should be. This is how he’s imagined it, too many nights falling asleep alone, remembering her, wanting her. She convulses under his hand and shakes through the release; she says: “I want you. Please.”

He lets her go entirely and touches her body, something in him burning pleasantly that she lets him, that she settles under his gentler touches. “I should make you wait,” he says, and she sputters at him, and he laughs at her. She smiles up at him, relaxed, and she curls one leg loosely against the side of his calf, rubs affectionately with the ball of her foot. “What do you want me to do,” she asks, “get on my knees and beg?”

 _Yes_ , McCoy thinks and the renewed vehemence of it shocks him all over again but makes the need surge, makes him press down on her and push in, makes him move hard and sure. She wraps herself around him and makes it worse, gazing at him and touching him and - “Goddamn, Christine, honey,” he gasps as she goes tighter around him, “Jesus _fuck_.”

Her eyes shine. “You kiss your momma with that mouth, mister?” He kisses _her_ and she flips him over and goddamn, he thinks as she moves on top of him, lets herself have what she wants at last, goddamn it, but he loves this woman and everything about her. He grits his teeth when she comes again, her back arching hard and her breath panting up to the ceiling, and it’s all he can do to wait her out before stealing her back beneath him once more and taking her mouth, taking his release, his relief in her.

He draws a bruise into her neck, marks her. He can't bring himself to move, to let her loose just yet. He speaks knowing she won't be able to hear him. Part of him hopes she'll let it slide.

She doesn't, murmurs inquiringly. He closes his eyes and says, again, "I said I love you, damn it."

Her silence begins to feel like the worst thing he's ever heard, just before she says, softly, her fingers stroking gently at his neck, "I'm glad. Me, too."

He sleeps deeply, tangled up with her. In the morning he wakes to a familiarly empty space beside him on the bed and sits up slowly, rubs the back of his neck, tries not to worry.

Christine comes out of the bathroom. She's rummaged up a shirt of his; it swallows her up and hangs to a suggestive point on her legs. She's brushing her teeth slowly. "That's my shirt," he grumps, frowning at her.

She pulls the brush out, stares at him. "Yep," she says evenly. "Stole one of your toothbrushes, too."

McCoy lies back down and rolls onto his side, watches her make herself at home. "It's all yours, honey," he mutters, and yawns.

Christine smiles, slowly. "Okay, then."


End file.
